congoo.com The news aggregation service Congoo: Is it really offering all that it claims?

Can I Congoo? Not quite.

Congoo.com, a news aggregation and alert tool that's supposed to offer one-off or limited subscription access to paid content, doesn't work. At least not for me.

The premise is a good one. You may hit a Web site that requires subscriptions, yet you only want one or two stories from that site. Rather than paying for a full subscription, or missing out on the material entirely, Congoo provides limited access. I signed up in February to see whether it would deliver valuable information -- and, in effect, beat the Google and Yahoo news alerts I rely on heavily.

No such luck.

Because it's topic-based rather than keyword-based, Congoo delivers a lot of material I'm not interested in, along with an occasional article I might click because I haven't seen it elsewhere.

So far, I've clicked on three stories that were "premium" content -- that is, hidden behind subscription walls. As I understand it, Congoo's supposed to offer me some of those articles for free, or at least a method of paying for those items or receiving them on a trial basis. But it hasn't worked. When I hit the subscription wall, I hit it. No extra access, no special passes or "subscribe through Congoo" notes or anything like that.

Maybe I don't understand the premise of Congoo, or maybe I have to allow them to load their NetPass toolbar on my browser. (Sorry, I ain't adding yet another toolbar unless they prove its value to me in advance. And they haven't.) Or maybe it just isn't working. But it isn't working for me.

Finally, for whatever reason -- perhaps my fault, not theirs, or perhaps Outlook's -- I haven't been able to convince my Outlook server that the Congoo alerts are whitemail and should not be treated as spam. So I constantly have to fish them out of my spam folder. Yet another nuisance that makes Congoo more trouble than it's worth, at least for me. At least for now.

Have you tried Congoo? If so, what has your experience been? Please comment below.