As it became known to all iGoogle fans, now the gadget displaying feeds shows a pop-up message with the contents of the news under the cursor. It cannot be said that this is a novelty, since such functionality has already been in Netvibes and Pageflakes. But which of them is better for prompt reading of the most necessary RSS feeds, the information in which is vital at the moment of appearance?
I'll start with iGoogle: the developers didn't bother using HTML tools and just added the title attribute to all news headlines. The solution is universal, reliable, but not beautiful, does not show formatting and incorrectly shows special characters.
Netvibes were not too lazy to write code to display a pop-up message in a separate HTML element:
It looks nicer, you can show both formatting and special characters. However, there are also rough edges: an empty element for elements with non-textual content looks sloppy, the flickering of the element itself when redrawing is annoying, records are cut off too much, forcing almost always to open a message.
Now let's take a look at Pageflakes:
You can immediately note that this is a proprietary implementation, just like Netvibes. And devoid of the main drawback: cropped texts. Otherwise, they are very similar.
Conclusion: If I wanted to quickly read the contents of RSS feed messages without opening them, I would prefer the Pageflakes implementation. But all these gadgets have one drawback in common: I can't exclude a viewed or unnecessary message as simply as looking into it.
