My thinking on RSS readers
Personally, I don't like Dave's RSS river of news format. I really don't like reading a list of thousands of new and archived RSS items. It assaults my sense of order. I do like the active bookmarks method for RSS better. In this system, new items are attached to context (the source).
I think we are going to find that people divide down the middle on this in a similar way to how people use e-mail. Half of the e-mail users I know let all the e-mail accumulate in the inbox (unsorted). They only focus on the new things and use search to get at the archive. The other half use the inbox as a "hot file" and put older e-mails into an archive directory (for ease of access later). Some advanced users even flow e-mails from some sources using scripts directly to specific folders so the inbox remains "clean." This points to a hybrid solution for RSS. A reader that uses the river of news for an inbox and auto-categorizes the read items for rapid search and retrieval may be THE optimal solution. That way, both types of reading styles get what they want.
I'm not sure if this is what NetNewsWire does on a Mac, but on a PC RSS Bandit comes close: cascading "newspaper" a.k.a river-of-news views, you can also view items in a traditional mail-client way. It also has Search Folders to pre-sort your feeds.
Posted by: Prasenjeet | July 14, 2006 at 11:00 AM
I haven't moved beyond Dave's approach (first on RadioUserland; now on Kinja.)
The real problem is this: What happens when it takes 24 hours to simply scan a day's worth of news feeds?
Posted by: Yudel | July 14, 2006 at 12:11 PM
In Windows the free JetBrains Omea offers both river-of-news and inbox type viewing. Superb but rarely heard of tool.
(Link: http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/ )
It also has annotation (rare in readers for whatever reason but I'm finding to be absolutely vital).
Posted by: Shloky | July 14, 2006 at 01:02 PM
Does anyone know of one that allows you to "take a snapshot" of a page that the RSS links to?
Posted by: John Robb | July 14, 2006 at 02:16 PM
Hi John, I pointed to this piece from Scripting News, because it's important that people consider all views. My only concern is taht people know that there are other ways to use RSS. I know for a fact that you've tried River of News, and if you prefer the three-pane aggregator approach then more power to you.
I don't get thousands of new bits of news every time I look, btw -- just a couple of dozen. I could handle more, easily. :->
Posted by: Dave Winer | July 14, 2006 at 02:43 PM
I find that BlogLines has a decent hybrid approach. You start out clicking on individual feeds to review them.
But you can make folders and put feeds in them. Then you can either continue to click on an individual feed, or you can click on a folder and get all its subfeeds at once (still ordered by feed, then date).
Posted by: Bill Seitz | July 14, 2006 at 03:46 PM
I've recently started using the online version of newsgator, and sort of like bloglines, it has both: Feeds are collected in folders, and you can view all (unread) items in a folder at once, sorted by date.
Works fine, and still gives the option of locating a specific feed.
Posted by: Morten Frederiksen | July 14, 2006 at 04:24 PM
As I commented on Dave's original post, FeedDemon (on Windows) also offers this hybrid approach as described by others here, and I believe it offers auto-aging of some sort though I haven't used it myself (in answer to the question above re: scanning taking longer than 24 hours).
Source-context was my biggest problem with the River of News style back in the day... i.e., I want to read several posts in a row from the same feed so I can stay in "that voice" throughout... Context-switching back and forth between authors is, for some reason, very mentally uncomfortable to me. And admittedly, sometimes I scan a dozen posts before just quickly Ctrl-A'ing the entire feed Read (which I prefer to auto-aging).
Would be cool to aggregate a "tips and tricks" site that covered various approaches and best practices for all the aggregators... I bet there are lots of great FeedDemon tricks I don't know about, and might be other "killer features" in other products that I'd happily try if I knew about them.
Posted by: John Stanforth | July 14, 2006 at 05:13 PM
@John Stanforth
Although it's a bit out of date, there's a FeedDemon Tips blog (hosted on Nick's blog):
http://nick.typepad.com/feeddemontips/
Some of the tips are still applicable to FD 2.0.
One FD2 specific tip I keep meaning to post is that you can convert any search result to a News Bin or Watch by right-clicking on the result in the subscription list.
Jack Brewster
Technical Support
NewsGator Technologies
Posted by: Jack Brewster | July 18, 2006 at 05:48 PM