If your regular morning routine is to open half a dozen websites and spend half an hour so seeing what’s new, you’ve probably realised that the amount of new information published each day can soon outstrip the amount of time you have available to read it.

An RSS reader is one way to distil several (or even hundreds) of websites down into a readily digestible form, but they’re not much use for monitoring other online info. With the explosion of web-based email services, mailing lists, forums, weather forecasts, stocks and shares reports, photo galleries, streaming videos, social networking sites and everything in between, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to keep on top of everything. Unless, that is, you exploit yet another cunning bit of web technology – the aggregator.

We've taken a look at the five leading aggregators -- NetVibes, PageFlakes, MyYahoo, iGoogle and Microsoft Live. See what we thought after the cut. 

Although an extension of the RSS reader, web aggregators offer so much more. The best can collate all kinds of information from all kinds of websites, and present it in such a way that you can get a quick overview of what’s happening at all of your favourite online haunts in a matter of seconds.

In most cases, you never need click beyond the bounds of the aggregator if you want more than a top-level summary of what’s new and being wholly web-based, you can access your personalised pages from any computer.

The basics

There are several different kinds of aggregators, but they all conform to the same basic idea – they gather information from one or more web pages into a single place, where you can browse through it at your leisure. The big attraction is that you don’t need to visit several websites in succession to get your information fix, nor do you need to know their web address – the aggregator sucks the latest posts from the sites and presents it in a consistent, easily digested form.

For mobile users, aggregators are especially helpful because they pull all the valuable information you might want from the web and put it in one place. For example, let’s say you are mostly interested in the news of the day. You pull up to a coffee shop, unpack your laptop, and get online. Normally, you might search for the BBC or browse through a few news sites. With an aggregator, once you configure your start page, the news comes to you in digestible chunks. Of course, you can click on any link to read more about a story, but the time savings is in having one page with the content you’re most likely interested in.

It’s important to point out that a web aggregator is not quite the same as an RSS reader, such as Google Reader or Bloglines. They’re certainly similar, but web aggregators offer extra features that let you additional web-based info like weather reports, stock data, and so on.

The basic idea: an aggregator is a one-stop shop for all your web needs, plus RSS feeds, plus widgets, plus...the kitchen sink. They are truly indispensable aids.

Netvibes

Netvibes is the reigning champ of web aggregators. It’s the easiest-to-use, the most customizable, and the most powerful of all the services we tested. And we’re here to throw more plaudits at its feet (er, if it had any), although PageFlakes has certainly made some interesting improvements of late.

Netvibes is a real joy to use. When you add new content, a sidebar appears where you can drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds, and other web info onto the main start page. Aggregated content is presented as blocks (one per website) on one or more tabbed pages. For RSS feeds, only the headlines are shown – the full story pops up when you hove the mouse pointer over one. This makes is easy to get a quick overview of what’s happening on your favourite sites without having to scroll through long lists of information.

It supports OPML files, which contain a library of RSS feeds. Let’s say you normally use Google Reader and have a collection of RSS feeds. You can export them as OPML, and then load them into Netvibes. Unlike Live.com, which tends to bury imported OPML feeds, Netvibes places them on the sidebar so you can drag them into place.

Netvibes also supports all the popular web e-mail clients such as Gmail and AOL, and there’s an e-mail wizard that walks you through the simple config process. You can even configure your POP mail to appear in Netvibes, but we must emphasize ‘appear’. Of the aggregators we tested, only PageFlakes actually allows you to send mail within the aggregators -- most just let you read your mail.

Most aggregators offer collections of widgets to add all manner of useful tools to your pages and Netvibes is no exception. At the last count, there were well over 100,000 available (of dramatically varying usefulness), but this is still less than the 200,000-odd offered by PageFlakes.

You can also choose from around 5,000 user-generated pre-populated ‘tabs’ that come complete with aggregated content from websites on a variety of topics, and around 800 ‘universes’ that present multiple feeds from single websites on a single page. And, of course, you can share your own pages to give something back to the Netvibes community.

You’ll need to register with Netvibes if you want to preserve and customise your pages, but it’s free and once done, you can access your content from any web browser. The mobile version is particularly well implemented too, so you can access your favourite site feeds and widgets from any handheld browser.

PageFlakes

Here’s the short scoop on PageFlakes – it’s always trailed behind Netvibes in the hype stakes, with a slightly more cumbersome user interface and not quite as much power over the look and feel. Recently, the site upped the ante with its new Pagecast feature.

Basically, you can share your start page with other users so they can view it and use it almost like a podcast. While Netvibes uses an “ecosystem” of user-created widgets , PageFlakes has a more granular library of 237,000 “flakes” (a.k.a. widgets) and it’s the best service for ‘rich’ applications like online storage, message boards, and YouTube video archives.

In terms of setup, PageFlakes also takes the cake from Netvibes. Upon visiting the site, you’ll find that it detects uses your IP address to determine your location and populates the default page accordingly.

Moving widgets around on the page is easier in PageFlakes than other aggregators, particularly iGoogle, although adding new widgets is a bit confusing since you have to click a link at the bottom of the page. PageFlakes was the only aggregators we found that let us send a Gmail message from the aggregator itself, though.

With more layout customizations, and an easier way to add widgets, PageFlakes could beat out Netvibes – although we know our top aggregator pick will likely add more social networking features like Pagecast in the near future.

Update: Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen has emailed us to say that after reading this review, he agreed that the new widget option was a little too tucked away, so the Pageflakes people have tweaked the design to make it a much more obvious big yellow button at the top right of the page. Nice work, Pageflakes!

iGoogle

If you’re already a Google Mail or Reader user, there’s no reason to even consider other web aggregators. With just a few clicks, you can see your Gmail and add all of your Google Reader RSS feeds. That said, while you can view Gmail, you can’t actually send a Gmail message – for that, you need PageFlakes...

iGoogle also supports five other e-mail clients including Yahoo! and AOL, so it is not completely Google-centric. Of the aggregators we tested, iGoogle has by far the most powerful and fastest search – for internet searching and for finding iGoogle widgets (of which there are many).

Not so fun is the fact that iGoogle seems a bit clunky in its basic operation. Sometimes, new widgets don’t appear on the start page, or they don’t snap into place when dragged around.

Of the aggregators, iGoogle is not nearly as customizable in terms of look and feel as Netvibes or PageFlakes. The interface in iGoogle is nothing to marvel at – it looks like every other raw, unadorned Google interface, from Google.com on down. It would also be nice to have a more prominent link (or maybe even an icon?) to add widgets instead of just an innocuous “add stuff” link on the far right of the main start screen. So, there’s not much thrill here, but there’s still plenty of functionality.

MyYahoo

MyYahoo.com looks like a bit of a copycat in the web aggregator game, though the search giant obviously has a massive following and a very active community. There’s a bit more of a web application feel to it, too.

For example, when you add a widget, there’s an animated icon that acts like the little Yahoo! squirrels are busy doing something important. (Netvibes just adds the new widget with no fanfare.) And, true to the trend in web searching of late, MyYahoo has the most intrusive ads and the least open interface – it’s not nearly as customizable as PageFlakes.

This commercialisation also makes MyYahoo a bit cumbersome in other ways. It’s slow to load and while you can search for widgets, you have to click through a few options first. There’s no apparent support for OPML either, so you can’t easily add an existing library of RSS feeds. Worst of all, MyYahoo would sometimes crash the browser or cause the browser to stall for long periods.

So, why use it? For starters, MyYahoo offers the most widgets and the sheer variety of tools dwarfs that of other aggregators. If your main goal is to keep tabs on the web without getting lost on the web, MyYahoo is the best option available – even compared to Netvibes.

Microsoft Live

Microsoft took some heavy flak from the web community when it announced its new foray into Web 2.0. After all, isn’t the staid operating system company supposed to leave the innovative programming to college kids and start-ups?

After the negative hype died down, it was as though Live.com had been dismantled in disgust -- yet, it is still alive and thriving. Live.com is relatively easy to use and customizable, with a look that fits in well with the Live Search page.  The portal also has some power under the hood. You can import and export OPML files with all of your RSS feeds, and there’s a growing library of widgets.

Oddly, the interface for Live forces you to wade through a tree structure to find new add-ons – you can’t just search for them like you can in Netvibes. When you do import an OPML file, Live places it in a rather obscure My Stuff area where you can drag them onto your start page. Even the “Add Stuff” link is hard to find. You would expect Microsoft to have some long complex link such as “Customize and personalize your start-up page” so the shortened name is a bit surprising.

The fact is that Live.com doesn’t really deserve as much criticism as the web community has given it. There’s a growing library of widgets, thanks in part to the new support in Windows Vista for the same widget format. Integration with Windows Live Mail (or Live Hotmail, or whatever it’s called now...) is helpful if you use that service, although we experienced a few “server not available” errors during testing.

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