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.

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)

These new Flash applications are always visually stunning, even if they are not as fast as their Ajax counterparts. GritWire is no exception – its well designed.

The RSS reader is functional but not spectacular. There are OPML import options and a feed search, but images are not shown in the reader and most (all?) formatting is also stripped out.

There are, however, a number of additional features, including a podcast player, alerts (I can’t seem to make this work) and a “wiki” feature. The wiki is a basic text box that can be edited by you and, I assume, your friends. It’s a nice collaboration tool (I want something like this wiki on my desktop for easy group working).

The Gritwire blog is here. Gritwire is hosting a big open bar launch party tonight at a San Francisco bar called The Cellar – in my opinion this was a bad idea. Expensive launch parties are very Web 1.0. Instead of throwing a party (and spending all your time asking everyone to attend), you should have just rented a room and demo’d the product for bloggers and other journalists all day. Very few people who show up for the free booze will give a damn about your product. I did, however, have a great conversation with Steven Cohen about Gritwire at the Pluck get together this evening. My guess is he’ll write more about Gritwire tomorrow sometime.

And I went home early (ignoring your party) so that I could test your product and write about it.