Philipp: I'm one of the geeks behind Alertle. Yea..it has certainly been off to an interesting start :)

Idea behind Alertle was to provide the optimal feed reading experience for everyone, from novice to power users. And the user interface which we came up for it involved going to great lengths to make it work. So uptil now it works in Firefox and Safari...IE requires a bit more tweaking. But its coming very soon!

I am a blogger and love to 'read' a lot on the web myself and when I was using some of the 'other' feed readers, the following things used to really annoy me:
- Telling me how many articles I have NOT read. Alertle deliberately doesn't tell you that. Its not email where you "have" to know.
- A lot of clicking. Alertle has a unique feature called Autoplay and very intuitive keyboard shortcuts – the arrow keys instead of "j","k"!
- Clicking on feeds. Alertle has big, desktop-like icons for feeds...so you can't miss them :P. Yet the way they are organized, users can quickly access upto a 1000 feeds. You can simply read more in less time and have fun doing it.

So if you love RSS, Alertle is the ideal tool for you. Most of the other feed readers treat feed reading like email. It was time for a fresh approach :)

Demo: http://blog.alertle.com/?p=14
Comparison against Google Reader: http://blog.alertle.com/?p=10

Varun can you please sniff for Gecko and not Firefox?

There are plenty of browsers that use the Gecko engine that are not Firefox. They render all of the code the same though...

http://geckoisgecko.org

Sam: You are right and thanks for pointing that out. Will work on this. I suggest you check back tomorrow.

One huge problem I see with Feed Reader migration that I have never seen anyone address is all the customizations and meta information one has done in reading feeds. Case in point: I can export my list of feeds just fine via OPML but I can't export which feed items I have starred in Bloglines/GReader or added tags in Google Reader. Also, while my Shared Items in GReader has its own feed, I don't think you can export the whole list and not just the last n entries.

Alertle ... sounds like the belittled version of "alert" in swabian slang (spoken around Stuttgart, Germany)