I was reading through my RSS feeds a few weeks ago and I came across a few posts referencing Shaun Inman‘s Fever app. I use google reader, but I often try alternatives. NetNewsWire is very powerful and Times looks clean, but neither of them worked for me as well as Google Reader. I decided to take the chance on fever and I haven’t looked back since.
Fever allows you to set feeds as “sparks.” A spark is a feed that you do not actually read every post for, but it seeds the list of “Hot” posts. Any hyperlinks within a spark gets tracked and added to the links in your normal subscriptions. The pages that are linked to the most bubble up to the top of the “Hot” list. This means that all the misc feeds that would occasionally have great posts have a proper place now. I don’t have to filter through posts on my own, they naturally make their way to the top. You can also do some fun stuff like subscribing to the “popular” feed for delicious keywords of your choosing, and mark them as sparks to catch what people are bookmarking as well as blogging about.
The interface is really slick. It hides item counts by default (google reader was always 1000+ anyway). The iPhone interface works really well (better than google reader, which occasionally freezes up and resets).
My only complaint is that there is no “Share” feature. You can save items, but you can’t generate a feed of items to share with friends. As a solution, I decided to start using my Tumblr account (http://michaelfox.tumblr.com) for sharing items. All of my activity is on FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/michaelfox), but I feel like that is too much… I want a way to share only items that I think others might find interesting.
If you are interested in what I find, you can subscribe to my tumblr mini-blog at http://michaelfox.tumblr.com/rss