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The world of the RSS reader has become a hotbed of com­pet­ing prod­ucts. Whether you opt for read­ers built into your browser, AJAX desk­tops or a stand­alone pro­gram, the options are almost bewildering.

Into the fray steps Spec­tra, msnbc’s very pretty effort that allows you to select from a range of colour-coded chan­nels. These then build into a slow-moving tor­nado of news (or a tornado-speed tor­nado if you set it in the prefs). You can then flick through your selec­tions to get an overview of what’s hap­pen­ing and click to get a pop-up with the full story. So far, so pretty.

There are two things that kill Spec­tra as a news­reader for me:

1. Despite the swirling eye-candy of sto­ries, actu­ally nav­i­gat­ing them means using a slider at the bot­tom of the screen and going through them one at a time in order. As a user, I’d expect to be able to hover over the tor­nado items and pick a story I want to read with­out trawl­ing through the rest.

2. Spec­tra is restricted to msnbc’s con­tent (and syn­di­cated feeds). While this makes per­fect sense for msnbc, there’s no way I would want to be lim­ited to a sin­gle news source. Add to this that, as men­tioned above, the num­ber of unre­stricted news­read­ing options is huge and I can’t see peo­ple flock­ing to Spectra.

Per­son­aly, I opted for the stand­alone free­ware Vienna which allows me to cat­e­gorise any feed I want to cre­ate my own chan­nels, run per­pet­ual searches on us, our clients, even myself (although the pump­kin carv­ing guy with the same name always wins out on that one), plus it has a built in browser. And for full on eye candy, I still like Jonathan Harris’s 10 x 10.

Shame, Spec­tra is awfully pretty.

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