Rootly relaunches... new UI, new features... a real news start page

Over the past few weeks I have been testing a new version of Rootly. When I reviewed Rootly in December 2006, I defined it as, "Rootly is a news aggregator at its most basic definition." While Rootly is still a news aggregator, it has some very cool and useful new features. Mark Daher, Rootly founder, is very excited about the new updated version and I think its worth a look as well. All of the details on the new version are listed on the Rootly blog.

It's almost as if Rootly is now a hot news start page. You can customize just about everything on the page including the tabs to make them the way that works best for you. You can set what is the default view for the site so you see the news that matters most for you.  

There is a much more friendly look with the new version (this was something I gave Mark a hard time about) which has lots of Ajax and Javascript to keep everything "live". The home page has a scrolling box of news that will keep you up-to-date on the latest.

Rootly is tracking over 1,000 news feeds and Mark says they are updating quicker than any other news site. In the RSS space, you can now combine feeds together to create master feeds along with the new trusted feeds. Basically there are feeds that are considered trusted to begin with and then as users set feeds up in their profile, those feeds will move into a queue to be verified to be trusted.

And to make Chris Messina happy, they have added OpenID support to the site.  Lastly, Mark is reading this thread so if you have comments about Rootly, feel free to post them and Mark will reply.

MTM (Marshall the Man) has more commentary about his work with Rootly.

Editor's note: Rootly is a former advertiser on CenterNetworks.