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One prob I have with the "river of news" style is that I really need to be able to make some feeds as "more relevant" than others.
There's stuff you browse, and stuff you devour.
Newsfire is 2-pane, with a feed listing on the left and the feed view on the right. I have my feeds organized in groups which I have to refine as my interests change, but currently they're something like this:
1. Basecamp Projects: RSS feeds related to Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com) projects.
2. Blogs (1st Tier): close friends and read with minimum latency.
3. Blogs (2nd Tier): bloggers I like to read when I have time to do so (they tend to write longer entries).
4. Blogs and News (3rd Tier)
5. Design
6. Architecture
7. Personal Content: feeds for my own content
8. Podcasts
9. vlogs
10. RubyOnRails
11. Social bookmarks (del.icio.us feeds of people I follow closely mostly)
12. Social Photos (Flickr photos of people I follow closely)
Now I usually read these in Newsfire's river-of-news way, which consists of pressing the spacebar to cycle between feeds. I usually have it set to "oldest to newest" river-of-news order for every new "set" of downloaded entries (i.e., every time I refresh and get new entries, i read oldest-to-newest for that newly refreshed set).
However, I can skip a particular feed in the river with a simple key combo (cmd + ctrl + down).
The two missing features I miss:
1. Ability to star particular entries and publish a feed of starred entries, possibly pushing starred items to del.icio.us (currently I click through to the entry and hit the 'del.icio.us' button in firefox to bookmark).
2. Ability to sync read state with an online server that I can then connect to from my mobile with a simple mobile RSS reader I can mark items read with.
Adding a feed is precisely the same action as adding any other bookmark.
Basically, it makes reading feeds a transparent process.
One thing I have not been able to do yet is figure out how to "BlueDot" an article I want to share while plowing through a few hundred feeds.
Do you use a personalized Google homepage? If so, do you use the Google reader add-in. Thats also very nice and works quite a bit better in FF2 than in IE7.
I hope they'll go above and beyond the other readers out there, but that's a blog post I need to get to this week.
The reason I use FeedDemon, is because it allows me to sync my feeds with other computers. During the course of a day, I could be looking at 3 different computer screens and with them all sync, I don't have to read a news item twice. I also use it so that when I'm out of the office, I can read the feeds on my cell/pda and not see duplicate items.
The interface has been vastly improved, and its' "river" style is very appealing to me. The only thing I miss is being able to read my feeds offline as easily as I can online.
I get the River of News experience when I scroll through "Robert Scoble's Shared Feeds" and I also get exceptional satisfaction reducing my unread items to below 100 by simple clicking and marking all those shared items as read.
After reading the comments here, I need to figure out how to filter my feeds. I didn't realise you could do that.
1. With Sage, I get a better eyeful of the variety of posts and helpful clips before I need to scroll. (the one liner view in Reader is too brief)
2. I hate when an RSS reader pops up a new browser window upon clicking on a feed story link. Sage in the left bar frame is perfect.
3. Feel strange about having a big company know the feeds I'm subscribed to.
1. speed. Much more responsive than Google.
2. locally cached for offline reading. Very helpful in traveling
3. flexibility. I can view a river, sort by feed, or evengroup feeds into folders. (Folders give me a tech river and a political river); instant switch between views.
4. standing search queries. If there's a topic I'm interested, I can set a standing query on it. Newsfire calls this a search feed. It gives me RSS goodness even if the source doesn't have RSS. I can point a search feed to any combo of web, news, or blog search engines and get new results.
5. smart feeds. Work like smart playlists in iTunes
6. good keyboard shortcuts
7. videos will play in the reader
While I understand the value of offline reading I think the value of reading anywhere outweighs it.
Overall, very impressed with G reader and have recommended it to the few colleagues who know what RSS is!!!! ;-)
But until Google Reader offers a killer feature which makes me switch, I'm sticking with Bloglines.
You can make some feeds more relevant in Google Reader -- just assign them to a category. Then you can get a river of news for a particular category.
For me, I set Reader to hide everything that's not new. Then I read my "important" category list first. When I'm done with that I mark all as read, then go to "All Items" and scan through the rest. Works like a champ!
If I have more time I can head straight to "All Items" and be sure that I'm getting everything.
I only wish I could customize the river for access in my mobile, since some feeds just don't make sense reading on the phone (f.e. image-rich feeds, or feeds mostly linking outside like the digg-feeds)
Anyway, I'm using Bloglines and I have been long before Google found out about rss readers and made their own. I have tried Google Reader but I just don't see that it gives me anything that bloglines doesn't give me. So I'll stick with Bloglines for now.
There is one thing about Bloglines that could make me switch. Resently they appeared to have more downtime for rep that they used to have. If that goes on I might switch.
But that might be the same with Google Reader I don't know. At least it is likely that I will experience downtime more because I'm in Europe and the american tech guys do their reps (wisely) when its night in the US as to not disturb their customers to much. Only problem is that when its night in the US it is daytime in Europe and I get the downtime.
http://www.bloglines.com/public/cisnky
I've tried Google reader and I like the open page summary of blogs that have been updated. I use Google mail and the whole idea of checking blogs and email from the same place appeals to me. Biggest gripe so far is that I cannot adjust the width of the left pain, so some of the subscription titles are cut off. (I do know about the rollovers)
I'm going to stick with Bloglines for now. I'm sure over time Google reader will improve and I may switch.
The sadly disappeared "SearchFox" was even able to sort the posts so you would be reading first the posts that were more likely to be interesting to you in case you didn't have time to read them all. That was REALLY useful: a river sorted by relevance.
Do you know if anybody is developing that technology?
What I want is the power of folders & sub folders as part of the google reader, and a really easy way to move them around, drag and drop on the left would be the go ( I'd happily drop sub folders if the trade off was drag & drop mgmt ).
Then I read your last post on google reader, and decided to give it another shot. And I'll be damned if I didn't have to switch permanently.
Google, aside from the easy J, J, J, J, K, S, J, J reading, starring, and sharing, makes it that much easier for me not to have to re-read and sift through feeds at home that I almost definitely got to during the day at work while I was slacking off.
I mean, I guarantee most of you read alot more feeds than I do (I am around 50ish... if I let it go a whole day I end up with like 130 posts), but it is still more than I Want to read twice in a day, once at work and once at home.
Hooray google (again!)
then when the new version of google reader came out i thought its performance was amazing..
that said ive switched to the earlier view of google reader.
I also agree FF2(Windows) rocks. FF2(Mac) sucks!
I like the fact that my feeds are in one place whichever machine/mobile/location that im at.
I like it because I can basically mimic the behavior of Newshutch, or customize it more, if need be. Newshutch, as nice as the interface is, doesn't allow for much UI flexibility.
Plus, I love all the feeds in Reader.
Oh, and I don't use all this shortcut key nonsense. I just open thing in expanded view and scroll down with the middle button, marking things as read automatically as I scroll.
Google Reader I tried to delete down to about 500 sites but when I got done all of my feeds has disappeared!! No way am I going back.
Newsfire RSS all the way! For all of the reasons given by all the Newsfire users above.
One of the real tests of a reader is how you feel when you return to it after a couple of days off. How have you found G Reader in that respect?
There's two things to worry about in mobiles and that's storage and network. The current Google Reader Mobile is great for common cell phones that have low storage or memory on their embedded browsers but going back and forth between posts is a pain when the latency is as bad as it can be with some providers.
I'm on a Sidekick which has a great mobile browser and EDGE speeds, but not only do I need to deal with cell latency, I also have to face the Sidekick web service as well, which scales down/proxies pages and is sometimes an extra layer of "slowness."
If there was an option where I could get a river of 20 items a page, all exposed at once, it would be perfect as I'm not worried about download costs or memory limitations -- just the actual act of requesting new page views for every read.
I love the river, what can I say.
@jay(#26) - I'm going to try that.
The thing that I miss from Newsgator the most is Fetch-links.
For example, some feeds tagged with "apple" are also tagged "mustread". If I feel like a little more Apple after I'm finished reading my "mustread" feeds, I click on the "apple" tag.
Using tags for river-of-news works well. I had to throw away the Reader-in-Gmail Greasemonkey extension because it only allows all tags.
I still have problems with that one feed I can't delete. I can't change tags on it either. GRRR.
But now it is exclusively the updated Google Reader. I love how easy it is to select a feed; g then u, type in the first few letters of the feed...jjj.
In Bloglines I absolutely hated it when you selected a feed that I hadn't read in a while and marked everything as read. It is great that Reader does not do this until you actually select the post.
At least try it, you'll never go back to Google.
Also, Snarfer doesn't have a river of news feature that I can see on its Web page. Also, I don't see keyboard shortcuts for Snarfer. Maybe it has them, but it doesn't have a list right there. Also, I don't see a way to share feed items with other people with Snarfer.
So, Google Reader wins. Next!
but I did export my OPML file and upload it into Google for when I am on the road and without notebook.
Now addicted as many as you at KKKKK! (yeh i start by the old ones).
Cheers
In reply to the first commenter: Wouldn't it be nice if you had an RSS reader that actually learned which feeds and topics you liked the most? ;-)
First of all, I like desktop apps that can be used offline (I get a lot of reading in hunched over my laptop on the NYC subway, believe it or not). (Prior to using Attensa I was a diehard FeedDemon fan; I still like FeedDemon but have switched for reasons that will become clear.)
Secondly, Attensa's tagging syncs well with del.icio.us, and it works beautifully in IE7 -- there are at least two great Firefox extensions for posting to del.icio.us, but this is the best I've seen for IE -- I like a popup form that allows me to toggle back to the page I'm bookmarking to have another look, which I often need to do while filling out the del.icio.us comment field.
Finally, I'm the social-web evangelist within my org and am always puzzling out which will be the easiest tools for busy staffers whose interests, more often than not, do not include playing with web apps. These people are already intimately familiar with Outlook -- why not give them an RSS reader that slots in with what they're comfortable with, and also slots into both Firefox and IE7 as a tagging tool?
I'm subscribed to hundreds of feeds, far more, sadly, than I can actually keep up with. I use the river-of-news view in Attensa, which is quite good I think. It uses attention data to surface the feeds you read the most (you can also sort by date.) I have a couple folders set up for the feeds I absolutely want to read daily and would like to read daily, and then about 15 other folders that I cull, through search, for whatever topic I want to read about on a given day. (Better than splog-filled technorati.)
Maybe I'd choose differently if I didn't have this interest in encouraging the RSS habit across the enterprise. But for those whose enterprise is not entirely populated by geeks with mad skills, Attensa's looking pretty good to me
The new version is slick, easy to read, I'm hooked... adios Pluck
We designed and built Snarfer (snarfware.com) for power feed users who need to read 100s (even 1000s) of feeds fast AND perform analyses of that data. A nice note is we did this in a 360kb download that includes a custom SQL database (that's an accomplishment all by itself).
We know many folks like Google Reader but when you try Snarfer you'll never go back to a browser based slow reader. Like Google's Reader, Snarfer is FREE and contains no spyware or adware. So load it up and try it, honest you'll never go back.
Cheers,
Kirk
Hope you'll all least give Snarfer a try. Hey you can uninstall it and it doens't leave anything behind so there's no downside.
Cheers,
Kirk
It does everything Google does and more. Only drawback is when they were acquired by MS, the support for Firefox stopped.
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