State of feed readers
I agree with Mr. Bray on this one. RSS/Atom brands and their graphic logos are too geeky and and modern browsers/aggregators are too hard to use. A ton of clicking to switch feeds/articles, which is the way most programmers I have known (nobody else I know uses a feed reader) seem to like reading their news - but not me.
I miss NewsGator (now NewsGator Web Addition). With some effort, it could be configured to put all my news in one folder, sorted chronologically, and I could read the few things that interested me and dismiss the rest very quickly, without having to select on each feed with new articles. If I felt like grouping by feed for some reason, Outlook could already do that (it would be cool if you could group by tag as well - maybe newsgator can already do that)? . It already is a three-pane container, so why write another. Well, not everyone wants to use Outlook.
I have completely complicated my life buy buying a PDA (Windows) and a Mac. There is an usability impedance mismatch if there ever was one. Anyway, what I would like is to have my RSS feeds synchronized across all three devices, and if my PDA is disconnected, I should have my stuff available to read. When I am reading my news, I never want to click to select a feed.
I tried Pluck, Sage, Bloglines, and Newsmonster (which seems to have hosed my Firefox 1.5 install on my Mac). I haven’t been happy to use any of them - I find them all hard (to time consuming and too much mouse clicking) to use. I’d like one pane that shows all my articles in reverse chronolgical order, with a “keep new option”. Closing that pain marks everything as read, and they are not presented next time. Years ago I used SharpReader and Syndirella. These aggregators were much more friendly than the current crop of Firefox extensions - probably because they used rich user interface controls instead of trying to build everything out of browser panes.
I wonder if anyone is working on an Eclipse-based 3-pane reader. I don’t wonder enough to search for one, but it seems like the type of thing Eclipse is now being used for.
The annual pricing for Newsgator Gold looks reasonable (I’d suggest $19.99 as a price I would jump on), a mail gateway might just be the ticket along with a way to synchronize my PDA. I may try their service. Firefox and Safari experiences with plug ins have just been unsatisfactory. If they bundled a mac reader into the service bundle it would be even better.
In the end, I think Mr. Bray is right. I think we are at least 10 years away from widespread (51%) adoption of feed readers. As long as you need to pay (i.e. spend time downloading bits from the web or outlay cash for extra products and services), most people will not bother with feeds. The free stuff installed with current operating systems just isn’t good enough, and neither are browser plugins. Maybe IE7 or Windows Vista or OSX 11 will change that.
Do you think it would be reasonable to expect, out of the box, that a consumer operating system provide a simple and pleasant user experience for reading and managing feed subscriptions?
Technorati Tags: NewsGator
January 6th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
I’ve been searching for this for months and no one seems to have it. I’ve tried lots of other readers but keep coming back to Sharpreader just for it’s ease of use and the fact that it’s not tied to either a browser or mail package. Unfortunately, there’s no way to sync it with my PDA or between home/work. Most mobile editions are really just small-screen versions of web-based products. I would think it would be a must have and pretty much a no-brainer for us early adopters to be able to sync reading amongst different platforms/machines, so why hasn’t anyone done it? If anyone out there knows of one, please let me know.