Rootly, which is a news aggregator in the style of Seattle-based Newsvine, relaunched its site for the third time in ten months yesterday.y
How it Works
Rootly allows you to customize your daily news reading with a mix of social features. Rootly allows its users to create customized news lists using tabs. These tabs can be filled with information sorted by category, or alternatively, by keywords. RSS feeds can be integrated into your customized pages as well.
The site seems similar to other news aggregation sites, but does add the ability to integrate your favorite RSS feeds directly into the pages you have customized using keywords and categories from the Rootly site.
This latest revamp has introduced quite a few changes to the site. Rootly now has tabs and allows custom feeds. Users can now also enter the URL of any website and get it to collect stories and integrate them into the customized page. Also new is support for the OpenID system, which will be of use to many readers.
Opinion
Rootly feels like a mix of Newsvine and Netvibes. While I do like the focus on news and I do enjoy the tabs and bookmarking capabilities, I’d love it if they used more social features like story voting. Rootly does combine quite a few good news sources, and the times that I have checked back, it is quite up to date with new material. This could be useful for users who are willing to put in some work customizing it, but I am not sure it is going to replace the likes of Pageflakes or Netvibes for news aggregation.
