Goodbye Google Reader, Hello Fever!
I’ve been using Google Reader for several years now. I’ve tried alternative readers but have always come back to Google Reader. In the early days I had a handful of feeds, mostly tech blogs and it was easy to read through all of them every morning. Over time I continued to add feeds, everything from tech blogs to comics to recipe blogs. Soon this began generating hundreds of items per day. Suddenly it became “work” to read through my feeds. I came home from vacation only to be greeted by 5000+ unread items. Google Reader was becoming useless to me due to this deluge of information, much of it duplication across several blogs. Then I discovered Fever!
Fever is a PHP web application that you run on your own server. While the author has done a fantastic job of making the install dead simple, the basic requirements of installing on a Linux-based Apache environment makes this a 4 on the geek scale (1 being able to open a web browser and 10 being someone who writes their own video drivers in assembler). Once you have Fever setup the magic happens, the application can import your existing OPML file from another RSS reader, then cache the items locally where using its own algorithm automatically generates a “heat index” of your items. This “heat index” automatically groups like items together and sorts them according to popularity. This way you can quickly skim the article you care about without having to read every feed. The other selling point for me is by default no unread item count is shown. By eliminating the unread count you eliminate the anxiety of reading all your feed items. The reader fits the “river of news” paradigm.
The interface is simply stunning. Every detail is well thought out and extremely polished. The use of Ajax make it feel like a desktop app and in fact using Fluid or Google Chrome Applications you can run it as a native app. There is even an iPhone interface which makes mobile feed reading a breeze. When added to your iPhone home screen it uses “web view” which eliminates the Safari header and footer, maximizing screen real estate. Overall I think this is really cool new look at RSS and I have no plans on going back to Google Reader.
