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RSS Screensavers: Let Blog Buzz Invade the Desktop While You're Away

If you live and breathe RSS, it's time to uninstall those Scrolling Marquee Text and Photo Slideshow screensavers that bore you by repeating the same images from your My Pictures folder again and again.

While the computer is not in use, bring life to your desktop screens with RSS screensavers that fetch fresh content from your favorite RSS feeds (including images).

Mac OS X Tiger already ships with RSS feed screensaver but Windows XP users, as always, are not so lucky. Infact, Windows Vista Screensavers don't support RSS. But there's reason to be disappointed, there are bunch of third-party RSS screensavers available on the web alread and here we'll help you choose the best one for your desktop.

» MSN RSS Screensaver - This RSS feeds cum Picture screensaver from Microsoft comes pre-configured with feeds pointing to MSNBC news sources plus you can add any of your favorite web feeds. The screensaver also doubles as a Photo slideshow like the Google Screensaver.

You will also see how many unread Hotmail messages and current Messenger conversations you have plus real time weather updates from US Cities based on Zip Codes.

Windows Live Spaces members can just add user name and the screensaver will display blogs and photos from their friends’ MSN Spaces.

Unfortunately, we could not test our XML feed to MSN Screensaver since this kind of format is currently unsupported. [Download MSN RSS Screensaver]

» Newsgator RSS Screensaver - This is our favorite screensaver that shows RSS feeds content and also the images attached inside the feed items.

Picture fans can subscribe to Yahoo! Interesting Photos or Flickr tags and the screensaver will turn the images from these XML feeds into your screensaver. Unlike the regular slideshow screensavers, these images are fresh and rarely repeat. Plus the screensaver offers multi-monitor support.

You however need a free Newsgator online account since this screensaver shows unread posts from your XML subscriptions. [ Download RSS Screensaver from Newsgator ]

Which RSS Screensaver do I choose ?

Other than the ones mentioned above, there are a couple more like NuParadigm and RSSMore but we didn't get a chance to review them.

But we'll highly recommend Newsgator Screensaver since it supports feed enclosures and adding multiple feeds is a one-click process. And above all, Newsgator is "the" RSS company that makes amazing RSS products like FeedDemon and Netnewswire.

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