I’m the kind of person that doesn’t like RSS readers. I know, it should be illegal for social media types to even say that, but it’s true. As inefficient as it is, I would rather take the time and go to my favorite sites to see what’s new. After all, a site owner put’s forth the time and effort create a compelling on-site experience - who am I to cut that piece out?

I have been hearing about this RSS reader called Snackr and I decided to take a closer look. From Snackr’s site:

It’s an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window.

The install process was a piece of cake. It uses Adobe AIR technology which makes it easier to run cross-platform apps using AJAX and Flash. After a painless install, I dropped in some feeds from a few of my favorite sites: Web Strategy By Jeremiah Owyang, Scobleizer, Jason Calacanis, CNN, Digg, and of course, Relevantly Speaking. Instantly Snackr started to stream headlines from these feeds across the bottom of my screen using an unobtrusive ticker. I was able to move the ticker to the top, bottom, left, or right of the screen. I elected to move it to left-side of my second monitor. Now, when I see a headline or an image that interests me, I can click on it, get an excerpt of the content, and continue on to the full piece if I like.

The only gripe I have, and this is really minor, is that you can’t resize the ticker to be wider or shorter. That would give it that little bit of extra customization that could come in handy. Other than that, I think it’s a damn fine little app.

What I can’t figure out is Snackr’s business model. You don’t have to give them any information to sign up or download the application, so it must be an ad play. We’ve dabbled in the RSS reader realm here at MediaTrust with a product called widgetQube. The thinking on our end is that we’d insert relevant ads into the news items and monetize it that way. Even though Snackr doesn’t have any ads yet, that would be my guess as to their end game. Hey, everybody has to make a living, so I’m not opposed to a few targeted ads occasionally.

Do you use Snackr? widgetQube? Do you have another favorite?