Sorry for breaking the embargo on this one, but it has already been broken.

We’ve got our hands on a neat desktop application called Particls. The idea behind it is to bring the news to you, right on your desktop, and Particls does this in several ways: through desktop alerts, a news ticker, and pebbles, which is a fancy word for creating an RSS stream out of Particls’ alerts.

Unfortunately, the ticker cannot be moved to the bottom of the screen.

Particls is designed to automate the process of finding news for you, but you can also go very in-depth. For example, you can only enter some tags and get news based on that. I’ve chosen several Web 2.0 related terms, and was satisfied - to an extent - with the results. However, if you like, you can customize every detail of the way Particls brings you new items; you can set individual feeds and import OPML files.

Generally, Particls offers a lot of options - almost everything is customizable. You can set levels of interruption, you can rate various news sources (Particls will make them more or less important based on your ratings); you can even see a very detailed history of Particls’ actions. Unfortunately, we were unable (obviously because the product is in early beta) to modify some important settings; for example, the news ticker was, by default, on top of the screen, and this didn’t work well for me at all; the option to change this exists, but it’s not modifiable.

How’s that for an in-depth set of options?

As far as Particls’ different ways of delivering the news go, they work quite well and replace several other tools I normally use. For example, you can submit stories to social media sites like Digg or Reddit directly from the news ticker, or copy the item URL with a single click. I’m not a big fan of scrollers, tickers and popups, but Particls has done everything to make them exactly as annoying as you would like, and the whole experience with it was quite enjoyable.

Whenever I see a product with lots of attention to detail, and lots of effort put into it, I think it’s worth trying. If you’re an RSS/information junkie, Particls might be right up your alley; even if you’re not a big fan of tickers. It’s also worth mentioning that Particls supports 3rd party skins and plugins, which will probably make it even better in the future.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under Reviews, Web, Web 2.0, Features, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.