Community news voting site Digg.com surprised some in the tech community recently when its small team announced it would build an RSS feed reader. The brand-new Digg Reader is now in open beta (digg.com/reader), just days before Google erects a tombstone for Google Reader.

I got early access to the beta and had a few days to test it out. In use, Digg Reader hit nearly every requirement for being a great Google Reader replacement. In its signup process, though, the new Web-based tool left a few crucial checkboxes blank.

I like that Digg Reader will have dedicated mobile apps (an iPhone and iPad version are fresh on the market, too), and I'm curious to see what features will be unveiled in coming months as Digg takes its RSS reader from free to freemium, asking users to pay for extra services.

The product is technically in beta, so while I will call attention in this review to a few instances of buggy functionality, those problems did not affect my overall scoring of the product.

Sign Up and Feed Importing

Unfortunately, there's no option to sign up for a Digg Reader with a simple email address and password. The site prompts you to connect to a Google account, which I did but wasn't thrilled to do. I prefer unique logins.

Automatically signing into Google, however, let Digg Reader import my Google Reader feeds without me having to do anything at all, which is just how Feedly handles importing. The transfer happened quickly, and I had all my feeds in the new Web-based Digg Reader within a minute or two. The time it takes to get your feeds into Digg Reader will vary depending on how many you have set up in Google Reader, so expect a longer wait if you have hundreds or thousands of feeds.

I didn't see any options for importing OPML files, which is a huge black mark in my book. If the only way to import feeds is to connect to Google directly, Digg Reader won't be a very appealing service to people who use other services, or to anyone who waits until after July 1 to sign up and can't import their data from Google Takeout (see these instructions for how to get your Google Takeout data and import it into a new RSS feed reading service).

Design and Features

In basic layout, Digg Reader closely resembles Feedly, The Old Reader, SwarmIQ,  Feedspot, and plenty of other Web-based RSS feed readers. Your feeds appear on the left rail, in collapsible/expandable folders if you've organized them by some schema. The center part of the screen displays a list of feed items, either expanded so you can see the full post or collapsed to just provide a list of headlines. Settings are tucked away under a button from the top menu bar, as are a few other features. All the Digg Reader exclusive features, of which there aren't that many, reside at the top of that left rail, above all your feeds. More on those in a moment.

G2Reader is the only free RSS feed reader I've seen that follows the same layout as all the others but adds little bits of color to give it a unique identity. If you're looking for a reader with a lot more visual pizzaz, try Taptu.

Each feed or folder with unread content has a number next to it indicating how many items you have yet to open, and in testing the early beta, I found the numbers didn't always reflect what was shown in the main part of the screen. Let's chalk that up to beta bugs.

All your Google Reader feeds will appear in that left rail, and an "Add" button at the bottom lets you save more RSS feeds to your list. You can add a feed of your choosing by pasting into a text field when prompted, or you can explore suggested content based on categories such as art, books, business, long reads, music, news, politics, science, technology, and many others.