Dave Winer was right about river reading

update to #49

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.

I used Bloglines exclusively for quite a while. I tried Google Reader when it first came out and liked how uncluttered it was. However I found myself switching back to Bloglines rather quickly.

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.

Two years in development, Snarfer is by far the fastest, easiest, reader. All format compliant and always free (no spyware, no adware).

At least try it, you’ll never go back to Google.

Kirk: I tried to try it, but I use a Macintosh now (at least part of the time) and Windows XP is required. Google wins because of that fact alone. Sorry.

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!

I agree, Robert. Google Reader is the way to go. I have probably doubled the number of feeds I have been able to keep up with in the past month or so. I have tried using the folders feature for organizing feeds–especially high priority versus others–with mixed results.

I use Omea Reader which works fine for me as it stores all the feeds in a nice big searchable database (to my knowledge this is still lacking in google reader)

but I did export my OPML file and upload it into Google for when I am on the road and without notebook.

I just knew from Google Reader from you, and I tried it. Ten minutes later I was moving from Bloglines.
Now addicted as many as you at KKKKK! (yeh i start by the old ones).
Cheers

I like the looks of the Google Reader and have played with it a bit, but I’m pretty happy with Attensa for Outlook. Can’t believe it only came up in a sole pingback here!

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

I switched to Google Reader a couple of weeks ago and it’s absolutely great compared to others I’ve used. What I especially like about it is the river style when you scan all headlines in a folder, AND, the keyboard shortcuts. Just click to open the first headline, then use the spacebar to go to the next, and so on. It’s amazing how something so simple can be so effective.

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?

I’ve come to rely solely on Google Reader. First, my feeds are note limited to an application sitting on the computer at work, or at home, and syncing opml files… bleck

The new version is slick, easy to read, I’m hooked… adios Pluck

Robert: Many thanks for your comments, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Snarfer users (50,000+) believe speed is the most important function of a reader. While Google Reader is still loading your feed page Snarfer users have finished reading their feeds and are enjoying a nice cup of coffee.

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

Kirk: are you using Firefox 2 with Google Reader? It pops right up for me in less than four seconds and is faster to get through feeds than any feed reader I know of. J J J J J J and I’m through six items, no clicking, no scrolling. If you can read all your feeds and drink a cup of coffee in four seconds (and that’s on my slow IBM ThinkPad, it’s even faster on my new MacPro) then you’re a lot faster than me. Not to mention that I kick open a ton of browser windows in the morning and go back and forth.

Ian and Kirk, I do agree that offline is a killer feature, though. It’s why I keep FeedDemon and ITunes and Fireant.tv and Attensa going.

Yes noticed that Firefox was a bit faster. We’re getting ready for a new release in 1-2 weeks that adds even more powerful features like tabbed browsing and some interesting database mining tools.

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

I’m surprised – no one has mentioned OnFolio.

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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