I find myself in a quandry as my place of employment changes over to a completely web-based email and calendaring system.  For about 4 or 5 years now, I have used my email client (either Outlook or Thunderbird) as my RSS aggregator as well.  I’ve been quite happy with this setup, because I like having browser windows open for Internetting, not really for mail, or word processing, or all the other crazy crap that seems to only be in “the cloud” these days.  In my mind, the beauty of RSS was that is could take the Internet and deliver it to me like mail.

One other issue that I have to admit has started to crop up in Thunderbird is that, since I read feeds in a few different places, I end up with repeats of “new” content, or subscriptions that are out of sync.  So, even though I could probably just stick with Thunderbird and use it only as a feed reader (and I might), I am entertaining other options.  Here are a few of the things that I’d like:

• I want a reader that I don’t have to pay much attention to. I’m gathering the feeds because I want my cage rattled when there’s something to read.  Even if I’ve gathered a number of feeds in one spot (to avoid traveling to all those sites), it’s still not worth it to me if I have to actively go and look at that page.  So, I need a fairly concrete and active alert system.
• Which items are new should be completely obvious. This might seem like a “duh” request, but I note it largely due to the RSS functionality built in to Firefox, which, while simple to use, doesn’t have a very intuitive display scheme, and it doesn’t notify you when there are new items.
• Syncing all my subscriptions would be nice. But it’s not necessarily required.

Soooo, the options that are immediately clear to me are the following (do you know any others?):

• stick with Thunderbird
• use the live bookmarks feature in Firefox exclusively
• pull all my feeds into my netvibes page
• start using Google Reader
• download a completely different RSS client (fat chance)

There must be options that I’m overlooking, or things I’m not thinking of, so if you have a comment, by all means feel free to share…