Social news sites like Digg are a great way to get a bird's-eye view of what's going on in virtually any topic without having to subscribe to feeds from an insurmountable number of individual sites. A number of competing aggregators have emerged over the last couple years, all of which take different approaches. Regator is the latest, and it melds social news features with a web-based RSS reader. Ars Technica went hands on to see if Regator has a shot at being the one news source to rule them all.

As its "blog aggregator" description suggests, Regator attempts to unite two separate products—a social news service and a typical RSS reader—into a single, one-stop-shop for all your news needs. Since the main page defaults to a "Top Rated" list of stories that have been voted up by registered users, though, the company is clearly focusing on helping users to find the most important articles from the veritable flood that is the Internet. A "Channels" panel in the left sidebar offers a basic list of categories and sub-categories that websites, blogs, and their stories are organized into, making it easy to zero in on a particular topic one is interested in.

After sifting through and voting on stories, and perhaps marking a few blogs as "favorites," users can check out the the "My Regator" tab of the aforementioned panel, where the straight RSS reader aspect of the site comes into play. Users can add a link to any website or RSS feed, and organize feeds into folders. This kind of organization is fairly standard these days so we weren't entirely impressed, though the ability to easily share news items to a Twitter or Facebook account (with more options on the way), makes it easy to keep friends and co-workers in the loop.

The ability to add any feed to one's Regator library, however, is still a very rough feature, even though the company went through a one-month private beta phase after "9 months of stealthy development." Even though Regator is now in a public beta, we were never actually able to get this feature to work. We could add feeds just fine, but multiple feeds, even those that are already in Regator's database of hand-picked sites, never displayed any headlines for us; they just perpetually sat loading.

Speaking of hand-picking feeds, this is one of Regator's few interesting selling points. Digg and most of its competitors thus far have an open door, we'll-take-anything policy towards the content that is submitted for voting. Yahoo's similar Buzz generated, uh, buzz, when it debuted because it didn't allow users to submit news items. Only a select batch of sites are allowed into Yahoo's Buzz social news garden, and, if you aren't on the list, you have to ask for inclusion.

Regator takes a middle road between these two approaches. The site debuted with a hand-picked list of over 3,000 sites from which content is automatically aggregated and displayed for all users to vote on. While users can add any feed they want to their personal RSS reader, sites must be submitted to Regator's editors for consideration before they will included in the list that all users see.

The company's blend of filtered news sources, voting on popular stories, and a personal RSS reader sounds interesting but, after playing with Regator for a bit, it's clear that it hasn't been executed very well. We all could use help in sifting through the cruft for important information, but basic features we expect from both social news sites and RSS readers are missing. There's no vote count on news items, for example, so there's no way to tell how many users consider a story to be interesting or important.

Given that we kept getting logged out while testing and the RSS reader never worked, it seems that Regator could probably have benefitted from a little more time in the oven.