I’m a bit of a news junkie, and as such, I tend to use RSS feeds to keep up with what’s going on. I’m typically a NetNewsWire guy, and I think it’s nearly perfect. However, one of the problems I think all RSS readers suffer from is the entire idea of RSS feeds – the more of them you subscribe to, the more difficult it is to stay on top of the news that you actually want to read. You get overloaded with yet another thing to keep up with, and eventually you give up (or cut the list of feeds you read down to the bare minimum).

Thankfully, Shaun Inman has come up with a pretty neat way to solve this issue, with his new web based rss reader, Fever. What Fever does differently from the other guys is it asks you to keep your feeds in two separate groups: Kindling and Sparks. All that means is that the Sparks are the feeds you subscribe to but maybe don’t read every entry (Andrew Sullivan, CNN, Engadget, other ‘high volume’ posting sites), and the Kindling are the MUST read sites (for me, Daring Fireball and other ‘lower volume, must read’ type sties). Fever then goes through and finds out what everyone is talking about, and assigns a ‘temperature’ to each topic. That way, if 10 blogs are talking about a certain topic, that topic shows up at the top of the list with the 10 blogs linking to it. This model actually encourages you to add more feeds, not the opposite. If you keep most of your feeds in the Sparks section, there’s no guilt when you leave them unread, as they will still be relevant in keeping you up on trending topics & can still be read if you like.
I’ve been using it for a few days and I’ve already caught onto news that I might have overlooked previously while skimming articles with NetNewsWire. There is also an included webclip-based application for the iPhone, so you can read feeds on the go very quickly as well. If you set up a cron-job to automatically refresh articles every half hour or so, you’ll always quickly have the latest news on your phone without having to manually refresh when the page loads. Very Google reader-esque.
A few minor wishes / issues:
- On the iPhone, there’s a little webclip jerkiness when scrolling from screen to screen. I wonder if that’s something that can be fixed? I’m on a 3G, so maybe it’s just something us folks on ‘older’ hardware have to deal with.
- Currently there are no ‘customized post to… (instapaper, delicious, etc)’ options yet.
- I would love some sort of ‘bookmarks import to rss’ option where it scans all of your bookmarks and adds every rss feed it finds to your sparks. That way you’d get the optimal overview of everything you read in one place. That actually might be a project I undertake in the near future.
- A way to collapse all of the sub articles in the ‘Hot’ screen. That’d make for an even quicker overview and a cleaner interface if you so desired.
Overall, I think it’s a fantastic product with a ton of promise. I’m actually spending less time reading feeds than I have in a long time, yet I feel more informed. Most of the time, sites I read like TPM, Huffington Post and The Atlantic might be talking about the same topic. Seeing all of the information about the one news item gives you an overview of what’s ‘hot’ for the day, week, etc. Being a web-based app means it’s always up-to-date (and it even automatically updates the actual software on your server!). Of course, it also means there are some limitations (no caching of articles for reading later, etc, but I’m hoping some solid instapaper integration can fix that). Shawn Blanc is a better writer than I’ll ever be, so here is his review of Fever as well.
Fever costs $30, and there is a screencast here that gives a good overview.