The company offers a Flash-based application that enables users to upload photos and add a personal touch via an easy to use toolset filled with stamps, text icons, captions, bubbles and more (Bubbleply does much the same for videos). The Graphita rich toolkit is easy to use to add, resize and customize each addition to a photo creation. The product is simplified for the masses and offers users the option of an authenticated or anonymous experience – thus positioning itself for higher adoption rates. Currently, Graphita is in closed beta and does not appear to support the addition of animated icons which might be something worth looking into implementing before its official launch in mid-May.

Upon customizing a photo, users can share them via email, print and send them back to their favorite photo sites (Flickr, MySpace, etc.), or even send them to photo pick-up locations (Costco, Walgreens, etc.). In addition, photo creations can be placed directly on consumer products like coffee mugs, tee shirts or other items. Graphita does not appear to offer its own social networking hooks but rather leverages existing products and services. However, registered users have the option to share uploaded photos in the public gallery or keep them private.

In the coming months Graphita is looking to further integrate with existing products so that users can have quick access to the Graphita toolset from their favorite online photo product. Competitors to Graphita include PikiPimp and Comeeko who both offer photo annotations. Of course, larger online photo products like AOL Pictures, Flickr and PhotoBucket could develop and add similar features right into their products, thus squashing Graphita chances for web annotation domination.

Editor’s Note: Frank Gruber writes Somewhat Frank, is the co-founder of TECH cocktail and is a product manager at AOL. He is pictured below along with fellow AOL’er Orli Yakuel.

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The event was captured on video by Liquid Talk, a Chicago-based startup focusing on enterprise podcasting solutions, which filmed event attendee testimonials (coming soon). Liquid Talk creates podcasts for large corporations to update employees with the latest company information. Technology Evangelist and Stone Cliff Productions also filmed interviews which should be out soon. Limousines were provided by midPhase hosting to give guests a classy way to get home, but according to Chicagoist there were so many limos that one was even reported stolen!

A number of established companies and startups showcased demonstrations:

eSigma, founded by Troy Haaland, offers one of the first standards-based consortium for publishing, consuming and managing Web Service-based business processes. Businesses that are looking to develop online products can leverage common elements, thus saving them time and money since they will not have to re-invent the wheel.

GrubHub is a Chicago-based free restaurant search engine developed by Mike Evans and Matt Maloney. GrubHub currently allows users to search for restaurants in Chicago, New York, Milwaukee and San Francisco with plans to expand to more cities soon. The site enables users to enter an address and then GrubHub returns restaurants that deliver to that address. Once a restaurant is selected GrubHub displays a menu, reviews, and coupons and even lets you create an account and place a food order online.

Pawky is an online video site for short film enthusiasts. It is about a year and half old and looks to grow short film content on the web. The selection of short films is currently in the hundreds and growing every day. The site also offers some web 2.0 social hooks which include film rating and comments. The most interesting or best-rated films are often bubbled to the top like the animated film Dealing with Women or the timely Life and Death of a Pumpkin. Since the short films are independent and user-contributed they do not have the same types of copyright issues that similar video sites might encounter.

Planypus, a product of Fifteen Reasons, a Chicago-based startup, makes planning a get together easy. Planypus works by notifying your friends by email, SMS text messaging, syndication feed (RSS) or by integrating into your online personalized homepage. Planypus has implemented tagging to allow for easier findablity of events or friends. Planypus sports a “My City” tab which suggests a number of local events and venues to help spark the planning process. In addition, Planypus enables user to organize a number of friends by creating groups. Planypus is soon to have a mobile version which will enable users to text to see plans, make plans, RSVP and make comments.

Time59 is a web-based timekeeping and invoicing product developed by Chris Monaghan, a Chicago tech developer with more than 20 years of experience. Time59 allows its users to create and manage multiple projects with various hourly rates, generate invoices and integrates with other third party applications like QuickBooks.
A few other startups did not demo but deserve a quick mention:

FitLink.com, founded by Jason Borro is a social network of people that want to get fit. It offers tools to help you get motivated connect with people tied into the health scene. For example, FitLink helps trainers connect with new clients, local gyms to find new members and local fitness groups to get their message out. FitLink’s business model revolves around selling premium services to health clubs.

HouseBlogs.net is a community-powered home improvement publication that allows users to blog about their home and home improvement projects. If you enjoy numerous weekend trips to Home Depot then this could be the site for you. HouseBlogs.net was started by Aaron and Jeanne Olson last year and was recently named one of the best real estate websites by Money Magazine. The site stemmed from blogging success in authoring House in Progress, a blog about living in a 1914 Craftsman-style bungalow in Chicago. It’s amazing the power of blogs these days. J

Menuism is a product with the slogan: “rate what you ate.” It’s similar to GrubHub and carries the restaurant theme as a mashup of open user-contributed restaurants, reviews, maps and menus. It also has a social network feel. Menuism was developed by Justin Chen and John Li, two UC Berkely engineers, as part of their company Two-Bit Operation and currently supports all US cities. Finally on a lighter note, Menuism has an orange mascot named Foodha who enjoys all kinds of foods and meditating on picturesque waterfronts, to guide users through the Menuism experience.

Metroproper, founded by Phil Tadros, is a social network for business or personal profiles with citizen journalism in cities around the world. MetroProper also acts as the parent site to the 400 localized metropolitan area community subsites – sort of like a local MySpace. Each site features blogging, RSS feeds, buddy lists, forums, event listings, real-time online status awareness, e-mail, instant messaging, classified ads, photos, tagging and bookmarking. The goal of Metroproper is to give individuals and small business tools to create a professional online presence. Metroproper had a pre-launch party in July but the site is set to officially launch soon.

Bottom-line: TECH cocktail 2 rocked an otherwise quiet Thursday evening in Chicago!

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ChicagoCrime.org, the freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago, is one of the original Google Maps mashup applications. It was created by developer Adrian Holovaty, a Chicago resident and lead developer of the Django framework. Chicagocrime.org won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism and was named by the New York Times as one of 2005’s best ideas. While Chicagocrime.org has not taken funding and is not a true company, we thought it was worth highlighting for trailblazing the road for other mashups to emulate.

Coastr, the online social guide to beer, was created with the goal of connecting passionate, like-minded people and new brews and beer drinking establishments. It was created by Brian Eng of Luckymonk and is a simple application built with Ruby on Rails. Coastr allows you to register to submit your favorite beers and beer drinking locations. You can also explore, rate and comment on your favorite beers. Additionally, Coastr offers a WordPress widget that can be added to a blog to share your favorite beers with blog visitors.

ExtraTasty (TechCrunch profile here) fit nicely into the TECH cocktail theme and is a creation of skinnyCorp, which has a suite of online products including the T-Shirt design site Threadless, the independent music site 15 Megs of Fame and Naked and Angry. ExtraTasty is a user-generated drink recipe website featuring tagging, drink submission via the site and text message, in addition to a drink rating system and comments. An interesting feature is the interactive drink measurement scale, which allows you to click on a drink serving size and the scale calculates the appropriate amount of liquor to concoct the specific drink recipe.

FeedBurner, the West Loop-based feed management company, handles over 17 million subscriptions for over 200,000 publishers. FeedBurner has a host of interesting products including feed metrics packages for messaging feed readership. The TechCrunch feed is managed by FeedBurner, which has over 80,000 subscribers. FeedBurner has also has been positioning itself to be a targeted feed advertising option. Leveraging FeedFlare technology, FeedBurner has been able to insert advertisements under content items back on websites. Think of it as an ad network for feeds and sites, which makes FeedBurner an attractive acquisition target.

Gritwire is a creation of Dizpersion Technologies and was previously reviewed on TechCrunch. It offers a number of useful tools including MyGritwire, a flash-based feed aggregator with a built-in podcast and video player, as well as social networking features which allow you to add contacts, recommend and rate feed content. Gritwire recently launched a new feature called GritLists. Gritlists allow you to create an editorialized reading list. Other users can subscribe to your list through the Gritwire aggregator. Just in time for TECHcocktail, Gritwire released Gritlist Badges, which allow you to post your latest reading list on your own blog, website, MySpace or Friendster profile page.

Naymz is an online identity aggregator created by Tom Drugan and four others all formerly of Orbitz. Naymz allows you to aggregate links to all of your personal online content (blogs, photos, social networking profiles, news articles, resumes, etc.) onto one Naymz page. This personal aggregation, or personal Naymz page, will then be optimized for search engine findability for anyone looking to find you via search. The company has five employees and has taken an angel investment of $250,000. Sometimes it is easier to just say just “Google me” rather than dropping a phone number or email address and that is where products like Naymz could come in handy — especially as more people create online identities via blogs, photos or online videos.

RipIt Digital, a music conversion service founded by Greg Frost, converts CDs, cassettes and LPs into digital formats and loads the music onto your iPod, MP3 player or media server. RipIt Digital saves the consumer the time and hassle of ripping music and has similar services to ReadyToPlay.com and GetDigitalInc.com. RipIt Digital has bootstrapped its way to converting more than 2,000 gigabytes of music over the course of one year.

TableTop Interactive brings to together television and the web by turning tables at your sports bar or restaurant into an entertainment control center. Each device is always connected to servers, providing live sports scores and updates linked to a DirecTV sports feed. You can check up on news, play touchscreen games, compete against people at your location and across the country in trivia and fantasy sports, and order drinks and food right from your table at your favorite sports bar. It is like a super remote control so you can watch the game you want to watch, right at your seat. TableTop turned on its first units at Players Sports Bar in San Diego last month. TableTop has an interesting business model, which includes selling the actual devices, monthly service fees, a 50/50 split with any game revenue, and TableTop owners are entitled to 25% of the advertising slots on the system for use to either promote their bar or restaurant or to sell to third parties.

ZapTix, an online community ticketing site created by Christian Perry, recently launched in beta. Since the service is a young beta, and is two weeks from launch thus it is light on ticketing content and has a few wrinkles, but they should be ironed out in the beta period. ZapTix is looking to bring community theaters ticketing to the Internet. In true bootstrapping style the whole company was set up on less than $10,000 by outsourcing every step of the development process and hiring no full-time employees.

For many, the classic “To Do” list is the remedy. But for heavy web users, there are a number of recently launched to-do list products to choose from, with convenient sharing and other features, and easy to use interfaces.

We’ve taken a look at five of the best.

Web 2.0 To Do Lists

• Bla Bla List
• Ta-da List
• Tudu List
• Remember The Milk
• Voo2Do

Note: we steered clear of some of the more complex personal homepage and calendar products like Zoho Planner and Backpack to try and compare only apples to apples.

We examined the usability and interesting features of these applications to find the most noteworthy procrastination remedy. All the products reviewed are free, and the normal set of features includes: sharing lists via email, emailing yourself a list and the ability to subscribe to your lists via RSS.

Bla Bla List is a simple to-do list product built on the RIFE, open-source Java web application framework. It’s fast, and offers the basic to-do list features and functionality. It tenders an easy-to-use interface, but loses points because of the annoyingly small pop-up window launched when you set up a new list.

Ta-da List by 37signals, the Chicago-based company, is built on Ruby on Rails and offers a wonderfully simple and clean to–do list product. Ta-da list uses lots of white space and larger fonts to make the list easy to read. 37signals subscribes to the rule of “less is more” and it shows.

Tudu List is unlike the rest of the to-do list products reviewed since it is not primarily a consumer-facing online solution. Instead Tudu list is an open-source solution which has been offered online by ESS Development AG. Tudu list is intended to be downloaded and installed on your own host and is the outlier of the group but we felt it was appropriate to review since there is a free version running online. Tudu list provides the ability to create multiple to-do lists with prioritized items on a deadline. Some interesting features are the backup and restore features which allow downloading XML files of a list as a back. Lists can then be restored online via uploading an XML file. In addition, Tudu lists can be shared with others.

Remember The Milk, an Australia-based company which was previously reviewed on TechCrunch, offers a smooth Ajax interface and rich user experience. It allows lots of metadata to be associated in the form of date information, repeat event and tags. Tasks can also be organized and prioritized by tab as well as sent to other Remember The Milk contacts. Tasks can be added via email, which could be a helpful feature especially if you have an email-enabled mobile device for on-the-go to-do updates.

Voo2do, created by software developer Shimon Rura, has a catchy name and a good (also Ajax) interface. However, it is a more complex project management task list than a simple to-do list. Voo2do tracks lists as tasks with assigned priority, due date and time estimates for each task. The interface is intimidating in comparison to Ta-da or Bla Bla list. Nevertheless, voo2do offers several interesting features including the ability to add a task via email, collaborate on password-protected shared to-do lists in addition to the ability to view your task history. Voo2do also has an API in progress which will allow developers to create custom applications.

Summary

The easy-to-use Ta-da list, with its clean and simple interface and good-enough feature set, is in our opinion the best choice if you are looking for an effective and easy to use solution. Online to-do applications are becoming competitive; products like Bla Bla list closely match the Ta-da list features, and voo2do and Remember The Milk offer more complex and powerful to-do list products. One feature that I think all of the competition should look into is mobile-accessible to-do lists because, unless you print your lists for on-the-go use, the traditional paper- written to-do list still could trump all of these products.

As popular as Google is, it is not the most well trafficked map service. It is virtually tied with Yahoo Maps (and the new Yahoo Maps beta product which we reviewed here). Comscore says that Google Maps had 19.1 million unique visitors in March, whereas Yahoo had 20 million. Both were dwarfed by Mapquest, with a whopping 46.4 million unique visitors in March, more than Yahoo and Google combined.

In addition to Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Mapquest, two others, Ask Maps and Microsoft Windows Live Local, also have compelling offerings.

We looked at all five of the current map services and examined their features and performance. Below is a feature by feature comparison.

The best? Yahoo Maps, for many reasons. More below.

Views

All the major map sites offer two or more different viewing options, including a satellite view, except Mapquest. All the other sites have hybrid views overlaying map information onto a satellite image. Google, Ask and Yahoo also offer a pure satellite image. Windows Live Local boasts one of the more interesting views called bird’s eye view, which adds a 3D dimension to the map image — a sexy feature, though its value lies more in dazzle factor than usability:

Zoom Champion

The zoom feature is a recognizable characteristic in most mapping services. Ask, Google and Windows Live Local all tied for the title of “Zoom Champion.” To determine the champ we performed a zoom test which focused on a single landmark and zoomed in as much as the application would allow. We then compared the five zoom levels to see which application allowed us to zoom in the most. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, check out our results below.

User Interface & Features

Yahoo Maps has the best product for obtaining basic driving directions. Its Flash interface offers both multi-point directions and live traffic information. Want the directions sent to your cell phone? Click a button, enter the number and you have them. Yahoo also has a very responsive interface. Taking into account all of these factors, it’s the best for personal use.

Ask Maps allows multipoint directions, and Mapquest will send directions to your phone, but no other service offers both. And Yahoo alone offers live traffic information.

Ask Maps appeared to load a little slower than Yahoo and Google. Ask.com does offer a notable directions feature called Auto-Drive which animates the entire route. Unfortunately, Ask.com was the only service that provided inaccurate directions in our driving directions test.

With Window Live Local the route from point-to-point is not marked with a line like its competitors. This made it difficult to see the actual route. Contrastingly, the service introduces a pushpin feature enabling viewer-determined points on a map. This feature also is a social twist as pushpin points of interest can be saved and shared with others via another feature called a scratch pad.

API

Offering an API has become an invaluable marketing resource. The resulting mashup applications offer free marketing and buzz around a web 2.0 product. Mashups aside, mapping solutions in commercial use can have the same affect.

Google sports the most popular map API and is used in a number of applications such as Ning, CommunityWalk and others.

Google’s API isn’t the best, but it is by far the most used service for mashups.

Expect that to change somewhat over time. Yahoo offers the widest selection of map development APIs (both Flash and Ajax). And recently, Zillow , with its fuzzy number Zestimates, incorporated the relatively new bird’s eye view offered by Windows Live Local via the Virtual Earth API.

Mapquest also has recently featured an open API and even prodded developers to take action by creating a developers challenge contest. Amazon’s A9 Map Beta is a notable Mapquest implementation since it associates street level images with streets on a map to produce a unique mapping experience.

Yahoo is the only service with mapping on web-enabled mobile devices without a download. Google Local Mobile Beta is a free downloadable mapping application, but it does not work on every mobile device or carrier. Mapquest Mobile is a subscription model which starts at $3.99 per month, but access to this service is also contingent on your mobile carrier and device.

Summary

Mapquest is the most popular mapping service but lags on features and usability. Google is the most notable and has a ubiquitous API. Windows Live Local dazzles with its creative views and features but falls short of the others in direction functionality. Mapquest offers a number of features but still is missing satellite imagery, which makes it trail the competitors in core functionality. Ask Maps is a worthy competitor but had the highest error rate of the group.

Overall, Yahoo Maps was by far the best application tested. Its fast Flash interface, multipoint directions, live traffic information, and easy send-to-mobile feature make it the hands down winner. It also features the most robust API options.

While the pay per download market is dominated by Apple iTunes and the quasi-legal AllofMP3, the subscription music market is a more level playing field. There are strong product offerings from AOL, Napster, Rhapsody, Virgin and Yahoo.

All of these services offer a music library of at least a million songs to users for a set monthly fee. The product offerings are generally broken down into three main buckets: PC listening only, “to go” which allows moving music to a music device, and an optional download service to allow permanent ownership of the song (with DRM) and that can be burned to a CD.

Note that none of these services work with an iPod. They all utilize Microsoft’s PlayForSure DRM technology which is not compatible with the iPod. Also, none of these services work on a Mac. You must have a Windows machine to use them, although Rhapsody has some Mac functionality.

The Music Subscription Services

Overall, the best service based on pure stats is Virgin Digital, which boasts the largest catalog of music (2 million songs) and the best overall price at $8/month. Unlike all of the other services, Virgin charges one price for both the PC and to go versions. Virgin also has excellent additional features like user reviews of music create a social atmosphere.

All of the services require the download and use of a special player, except AOL, which uses a web based approach along with the Windows Media Player.

For the flat out cheapest price, Yahoo comes in at the lowest point with a basic plan of $5 per month (althought the to go plan is $10/month, higher than Virgin’s single price plan).

But based on pure joy of the user experience, Rhapsody has the slickest software and the most intuitive user interface. It’s the most expensive at $15/month, but worth the money if you want the best service available.

Both Google and Amazon are in the process of developing online music products, and will certainly have compelling product offerings of their own.

While compact disc sales have declined 19 percent since 2001, online music sales have started to boom. According to a recent report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, revenues from digital music sales almost tripled in the last year, to $1.1 billion in 2005. Apple’s iTunes accounted for over 85 percent of the single song downloads, but Apple is not alone in the online music space.

Legal downloads now account for about 6% of record companies’ revenues, up from practically zero two years ago.

We’ve signed up for just about every music download and subscription site out there and prepared a two part feature and pricing comparison of the best. We’ve divided the sites into “rent” v. “buy”. “Rent” sites are subscription based, all-you-can-eat services where you get to listen to all music in the catalog as long as you continue to pay the monthly fee. “Buy” sites are pay-per-download services, like iTunes, where you can also burn the song to a CD, and then rip the CD back to a computer and strip out any digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.

The Music Download Services

There are eleven total sites that sell downloadable, CD-burnable music. However, two of these sites, AOL Music Now and Virgin Digital, require a paid subscription to their all-you-can-eat service in order to download songs (downloads cost an additional $0.99 each on both services). We’ve therefore left them out of the comparison chart.

Another, eMusic, is focused on independent labels, and we’ve removed it from the comparison even though it offers DRM-free music at an attractive price ($0.25 per song). eMusic is an awesome service – the side by side table comparision didn’t give it the credit it deserves.

The remaining eight services are AllofMP3, BuyMusic, iTunes, MSN Music, Napster Light, Real Rhapsody, Walmart.com and Yahoo Music Unlimited.

All but iTunes use the Windows Media Audio (WMA) file format. iTunes supports the AAC format. The only reason this is important is that Apple iPods won’t play WMA files, and non-iPods can’t play the iTunes AAC format. So your selection may largely be determined by which music player you choose to use.

The choice for best overall service is dead simple. The best service by far is AllofMP3.com. Music costs $0.02 per MB (about 9 cents per song at medium quality levels), and it can be downloaded in any common audio format and quality level. It is so cheap and easy to use that many people choose to download music from AllofMP3 in lieu of ripping their own CD collection.

The problem is that AllofMP3 operates under a different set of rules (Russian copyright law) than the rest of the companies. The service has been around for years and has many loyal users; however, its continued existence is in question. Some people have ethical concerns with using the service since no money makes its way back to the artists or labels.

Of the remaining services, the first question is what music player you will use. If you want to use an iPod, you need to use iTunes (or AllofMP3). If you want to use a non-iPod device, any of the others will work. The clear winner of the non-iTunes services is Real Rhapsody. They have one of the largest selections of music, quickly include new music, and have the cleanest user interface on the store. Rhapsody also has the highest quality downloads, at 192 kbps.

At $0.99 per song, though, Rhapsody is not the cheapest provider. That honor goes to BuyMusic at $0.79 per song. If you are price sensitive, BuyMusic may be the best choice for you.

Additional comparison information for all services is included in the table above.

There are a number of different types of readers: web-based, desktop, Outlook based, etc… This post is focused solely on web-based feed readers. I’ve included the big guys plus some up and coming readers with outstanding features and/or performance like News Alloy, Gritwire, Attensa and FeedLounge.

All the web-based feed readers reviewed are free except for FeedLounge, which charges $5 per month.

The Web-based Feed Readers

I examined nine web-based feed readers (for previous reviews of each of these, see the TechCrunch Index):

• Attensa Online
• Bloglines
• FeedLounge
• Google Reader
• Gritwire
• News Alloy
• NewsGator Online
• Pluck Web Edition
• Rojo

I did not evaluate MyYahoo, the most widely used web-based reader, or similar products like Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes because these are more virtual desktop applications or portals with RSS reading built in. Heavy RSS users need a more industrial strength application like the ones I have listed above. I believe MyYahoo is a great option for a quick read of your feeds or for on the go feed readers viewing the Internet via cell phone or handheld device, but this service does not have the feature set for a heavy information consumer.

Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines.

Google Reader and FeedLounge won my subjective feed-load test, which determines how well the application pulls up a particular feed. The test consisted of loading five feeds and taking the average of the load times and rating the reader on a five-point scale. Interestingly, FeedLounge is the only premium service of the group at $5 a month. Aside from the exceptional performance rating, I wonder what else sets FeedLounge apart from its free competitors. However, many users are religious about readers with a three pane display that FeedLounge, Attensa and Gritwire all offer.

Web 2.0 Features

Rojo, a San Francisco-based company which was reviewed previously on TechCrunch, has the most prominent web 2.0 swagger. News Alloy offers a close second though with itís tagging, rating and other content repositioning (i.e. add to Digg, add to del.icio.us).

User Ratings: Several of the readers offer rating systems, but I think Rojo’s “Mojo” is the most appealing. Mojo, a term reflecting user-generated reviews, mirrors a feature on the popular social news aggregator digg. After entering an item in the feed you can Mojo it to boost its relevance. NewsGator Online also offers a user generated content feature called “Latest Buzz,” which determines and displays the number of people linking to items in NewsGator. News Alloy employs a rating system similar to Rojo that tallies the number of times someone rates an item.

Tagging: Rojo generates a tag cloud from user-generated tags. Google Reader offers the same feature under a different name, “labels.” It seems FeedLounge uses tagging as the sole search and discovery mechanism. News Alloy also allows tagging of posts.

Social Aspects: Rojo and Gritwire feature “contacts,” which adds a social aspect to the reader, allowing a user to share information within a network of contacts.

Feed Discovery & Recommendations: Pluck, a Texas-based social media company, built a feature called FeedFinder into its Web Edition, which improves feed discovery. Rojo recommendations feeds in the top right corner of the layout while you browse.

Up and Coming Readers

Attensa, a Portland-based company, offers a reader that has a very professional and clean interface. While lacking many features the rest of the pack has, it pulls feeds up very quickly. In talking with Matthew Bookspan, Attensa’s Director of Product, I learned Attensa will be launching a new and improved version of the web-based reader that should fare better on the comparison chart. Additionally, Attensa will soon offer a mobile-enabled view of its reader, rendering nicely in handheld devices or cell phones.

Gritwire, a company based just north of Chicago, boasts a Flash-based feed reader that performs very well and offers integrated social networking features similar to Rojo. Gritwire uses a contact-list approach that allows you to share feeds among friends. I spoke with Ian Carswell, Gritwire’s co-founder and COO, who said Gritwire has more web 2.0 features in store, and I am curious to see them in action.

News Alloy, offers an Ajax driven reader with lots of power user bells and whistles. Though it underperformed in the subjective feed-load test Mike reviewed it previously on TechCrunch and found it to be extremely fast in other operations.

Feature Comparison Chart

The chart summarizes the research conducted in comparing these readers. I was not able to speak with every company directly so I may have missed some details. Consider this chart a living document to be updated if additional information becomes available. Also, I have left a number of competitors off this chart – there are so many web-based readers and I had to limit research to what I consider the main players in the field.

Summary

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Editor’s Note: Frank Gruber, who writes the excellent blog Somewhat Frank, accepted our offer to write this research piece on TechCrunch. Thank you, Frank.

Update: March 31, 2006 (updates to chart)