Opera released a beta version of its Opera desktop application last week. The new version features improved RSS handling including address bar support similar to Apple’s plans for Safari RSS. A user can choose between RSS feeds declared as alternate links of type application/rss+xml.
After you subscribe to one or more feeds a Feeds menu appears showing your subscriptions and unread items per feed.
The Opera RSS browser treats each RSS item as a mail message, complete with the e-mail address of the item’s author. I did not check to see which RSS element is pulled here but I presume it must be author. After each post is a bar for a user to respond to the post via e-mail.
Opera also has special behavior when an address book entry matches the RSS link element and item author. In the screenshot above, Opera ties together Jeremy’s weblog and Jeremy’s entry in my address book. The man icon next to each entry lights up and Jeremy’s picture is at the top of the viewer. Jeremy asked for some screenshots so here you go!
Overall an interesting take on RSS aggregation from a bootstrapped mail client perspective. I would like to see better interaction with community comments instead of sending an e-mail. I could always parse the e-mail and post it to a comment script, but it would be nice if the aggregators played nice with feedback.
