David Emery Online

Feed Me

18 November 2008

I have a feeling I’ve written this post before, but hopefully the landscape has changed since whenever that was.

I am looking for a new feed reader.

Bloglines has been my main connection with the wonders of the web for a while now. I have entirely given up bookmarks – relying on OmniWeb’s good address auto-complete for the handful of sites I visit without an RSS feed – so it’s not really hyperbole to say that, for me at least, the web = feed reading.

I have just over 800 feeds in there (although that does include a handful of dead feeds I have weeded out yet) and read through them all every day – I know quite a few people who routinely have thousands of unread items, only checking most of them every week or so (with a handful they check more often); I’m not like that – while I don’t believe in ‘Inbox Zero’ for email I certainly do for feed reading.

The upshot of this is that I need a very quick feed reader, that works in the way that I work otherwise it quickly gets unmanageable. The list of vital features is small, but seems to eliminate a lot of the competitors:

• It must be web based for two reasons – one) I use multiple computers daily and two) checking 800+ feeds every 5 minutes is a fairly significant CPU hit.
• It must have a simple two pane view – feeds on the left, the new items from that feed on the left – and that’s the full content from those items, in reverse chronological order (newest first). Also, there shouldn’t be any paging (more unnecessary clicks) – NewsGator makes this mistake.
• When you click a feed from the left pane, it must mark all the new items in that feed read – I don’t have time to click a ‘Mark Read’ button, and I may well scroll too quickly past items for a javascript-based auto-mark-as-read function to work correctly.
• It must have a way of viewing all unread items, that groups by feed – this is one of the things Google Reader messes up, as they mix all the feeds together in the unread view which makes it a lot harder to skim as you loose the context.
• It must be quick – NewsGator just isn’t quick enough, for example.

Bloglines ticks all these boxes, but recently the reliability has just got too much too bare – it’s been both inaccessible and unreliable (it didn’t update any feeds for most of the weekend, for example). I also get the feeling it’s on its last legs – it’s obviously not getting the attention it needs, and I’d rather move to something else before it completely collapses.

However, I just can’t find anything. Google Reader has caused all the problems, if you ask me – it’s free-ness and ubiquity has meant that there’s not that many players in the market. I’ve tried a few times to use it, and it just doesn’t work for me – it feels a bit clunky, and it gets both the ‘Marking as Read on click’ and ‘Viewing all unread items’ things wrong. Newsgator seems to be slow, unattractive to look at and forces paging which is a pain.

Sadly, that seems to be it – those are the main players, and non of them seem to be great. Does anyone have any other suggestions? I’m intrigued by this, but know nothing about it (cough invite please cough) and obviously hasn’t launched yet.

I’m seriously tempted to write my own, which is going to be an exercise in pain and frustration…please help!