The Search for the Perfect RSS Reader
by Patrick Ruffini :: January 20th, 2007 10:53 pmMy favorite RSS reader isn’t Bloglines, NewsGator, FeedDemon, or even Google Reader (yet). It’s a little known desktop app called SharpReader, which hasn’t seen a major release since 2003. I think this screenshot will explain a little why:
SharpReader seemed alone among the free RSS clients in providing a seamless “Outlook-like” approach to the River of News. I open up a folder, be it “Key Political Blogs,” “Technology,” or “2008″ and see a stream of posts from my subscribed feeds organized in chronological order. No need to page through each of my feeds to see what’s new.
The only other free reader that does better than a passable job of this is the new Google Reader. While other readers strive to be the Outlook of RSS, Reader takes the sensible route of being the Gmail of RSS. In many respects, the Google experience still isn’t up to snuff — Gmail for the enterprise, calendar, and spreadsheets still have a ways to go. Google Reader is successful in clearing the bar, in that it at least matches Google’s offerings in the productivity space.
Before I abandon the desktop entirely for RSS, as I have for mail, I would like to see the following improvements to Google Reader:
- Tighter desktop integration, maybe via Google Talk. Yes, Google, more integration with the desktop can be a good thing, as the disaster that was Desktop Search should have taught you. A tray icon that runs in the background grabbing my feeds every 10 minutes with some relatively unobtrusive alerting mechanism would be really useful. This could be tightly integrated with Google Talk and Gmail Notifier, perhaps with some subtle color scheme differentiation. One of the disadvantages of a Web app is I don’t automatically leave it running all day — so I get the mother-lode of headlines from non-timestamped Google News or Technorati feeds all at once. Background processing helps manage the flow better.
- Search? I can’t currently search my feeds. Hello!? Isn’t this Google!? Port over your Gmail search pronto.
- Sort tags into bundles. My RSS reader is probably the only area in which I’ve embraced foldering (and subfoldering!) vs. tagging or search because I’d be drinking from a firehose if I didn’t. When I imported my OPML file, my folders were converted to tags. I have mixed feelings here. Multi-tagging would seem to create a lot of duplicate reading, so I’ve tended to avoid it. Maybe the light hierarchy of del.icio.us bundling would apply here?
- UPDATE: Customize the refresh interval. There’s no way to refresh my feeds every 10 or 15 minutes, leading to a data dump every three hours — inadequate especially for those Google and Technorati keyword searches.
What’s your perfect RSS reader?
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Tagged: google reader 
rss sharpreader
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