Why should I use SimplePie Live! over something else?

SimplePie Live! is geared for web designers and web developers who are comfortable writing JavaScript. We've tried to make this service as easy to use as possible, but we still cater more to the technical crowd than the non-technical crowd. If you are the type of person who doesn't write code AT ALL, SimplePie Live! is likely not for you. In that case, I would recommend checking out Feed Digest. We compete more with Google AJAX Feed API than anyone else, and we believe that we've built a service that is better in a number of ways.

The first public beta of SimplePie Live! will have the following features and more!

• SimplePie Live! is 100% FREE!
• SimplePie Live! is built on SimplePie – a powerful, standards-compliant feed handler that supports lots of stuff out of the box.
• No signups, no registrations, no installation. We don't want your email address, credit info, or blood of your firstborn. Just use it. If you like it, keep using it.
• SimplePie Live! is a hosted service, so you never have to download, edit, or upload anything again!
• Has an API that functions in a very similar way to SimplePie's API, but much of the syntax was inspired by modern JavaScript libraries like Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery, MooTools, and others. If you're an existing SimplePie user you'll feel right at home. If you're developing in these JavaScript environments, SimplePie Live! will feel like it fits.
• Employs the same JSONP-based faux-AJAX that Google uses in many of their products, providing lots of flexibility for asynchronous development.
• Has a 100% complete Media RSS implementation, and all of the relevant parts of iTunes RSS (about 80%) making SimplePie Live! the tool for podcasts and digital media.
• Employs an ultra-liberal feed locator. We try extra hard to find that feed so that you don't have to.
• Supports well over 100 character sets, allowing the widest variety of languages to be read. You can display feeds on your pages in any character encoding you prefer (although UTF-8 is highly recommended), and you can also override a feed's (incorrect) character encoding while importing.
• Supports Internationalized Domain Names!
• Supports all versions of RSS and Atom, including a handful of namespaces such as geo-locations. Access to RSS/Atom data is normalized so that you don't have to worry about what kind of feed you're working with.
• Has integrated support for mashing feeds together and sorting their items reverse-chronologically.
• Supports RFC 822, RFC 2822, RFC 3339, and ISO 8601 datestamps.
• Has a MySQL-backed caching system with support for HTTP Conditional Get and gzip-compressed feeds for optimum server-side efficiency.
• Output is gzip-compressed and cached in the browser for optimal performance across all types of internet speeds.
• And more!

Additionally, we're planning the following enhancements prior to our 1.0 release:

• Support for Cross-Site XMLHTTPRequest implementations (Firefox 3, Adobe AIR)
• Support (and tools) for traditional XMLHTTPRequest implementations (via server-side proxy script)
• Better data packing for even smaller file sizes!
• Better server-side pre-fetching and caching to allow for faster response times.
• Live Extras, which provide additional functionality for enhancing feed data.
• Enhanced server-side favicon finding and caching.
• And much, much, much more!