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.