Fever Woes 30 October 2009

Back in June I bought Fever a feed reader by the very talented Shaun Inman.

The selling pitch of Fever states:

Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether.

I should have spotted that the opening gambit “your current feed reader is full of unread items” didn’t ring true and save myself £20 but I’m a fan of Shaun’s other products and hoped I’d love it when I got it. I was wrong.

That’s not to say Fever isn’t a well designed product, it looks great and is easy to use. Fever will scan through all your new, unread articles and group them together if they are talking about the same thing. If a lot of blogs are all pointing to the same story, it will bubble to the top, giving it a “hot” rating. Tech-related blogs tend to post links leading away from their site, so if you follow lots of them Fever’s Hot List will work great. However, if like me you only subscribe to the sites you actually want to read- Fever has no benefits over Google Reader.

Fewer Feeds

If it’s cool or interesting, you won’t miss it. Even with fewer feeds.

Brent Simmons arguing for fewer feed subscriptions in newsreaders. Given that he writes a feed reader for a living, it is probably worth taking note.

Rather than following five or six different Apple news blogs, I’ve deleted them all and simply rely on John Gruber at Daring Fireball to read it all for me. Yes there are occasions that Gruber, Marco Arment, Jason Kottke, Garrett Murray and others all write about the same thing on the same day… but it is their unique commentary that goes with the content makes them worth following in the first place. As the old adage goes, “quality not quantity”.

Because my feed is not chocked full of link-blogs, and high frequency news sites my reading tastes don’t work so well with Fever, so reluctantly I’ve given up and returned to Google Reader. I only subscribe to sites I actually want to read, sites with good original content. I read for the joy of reading- not the fear I might miss something.