RSS Readers–Why have you forsaken us? Part 1: Setting the stage

With all of the discussion of whether RSS is dead–RSS: A good idea at the time but there are better ways now | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com–or not–Marshall Kirkpatrick, Technology Journalist » If You Think RSS is Dead Then That’s Your Loss and It’s a Big One–I think we’ve glossed over a key part of the problem–RSS Readers. Dare Obasanjo took this topic head on–Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – The Top 5 Reasons RSS Readers Went Wrong–but I don’t think it go the attention it deserved. As I’ve been getting back into reading my feeds on a regular basis, I had become like Sam Diaz eschewing my RSS feeds for Twitter, etc., I’ve been restless with the crop of RSS readers I’ve been trying.

A dedicated FeedDemon user on my PC, when I switched to Mac I of course chose NetNewsWire. NNW is a great news reader, but I became swamped with the shear number of feeds I was following so I started using Times which has a (literal) newspaper layout…

Times is good for a few feeds, but not more than maybe 10-15 per section. Easy to skim, but a little hard to just dash through. It was the limitation of the feasible number of feeds that could be tracked brought me back to NNW, and this is where things get interesting.

NetNewsWire and FeedDemon now sync with Google Reader instead of Newsgator Online (which is being phased out), a move that I think makes both apps more powerful. The problem is (at this point) I’m back at the point where news readers are all lacking just a little something.

If I start with Google Reader, I have sharing posts (a great social tool for expanding your information reach) and “Send to…” but it’s rather hard to just skim, click, and move on. Google Reader lacks the very simple “Mark all these items read in this folder/feed and move on to the next” option and my choice of titles or the whole post is pretty limiting when you’re trying to consume a medium number of feeds (I’m back up to 300+ from a low of 50 from my once high of close to 1000).

As you know I prefer desktop clients for RSS and e-mail. I know this is rather behind the times, and I have played with site specific browsers, but it’s just how I find working most efficient. Syncing NetNewsWire with Google Reader isn’t a big deal. NNW has good keyboard shortcuts (including the one above for marking read and moving on with one key), but right now the beta lacks Google Readers’ sharing and send to features. I’m sure Brent is working on getting them in, but right now they are still missing so I wander to Google Reader to catch up on shared items. That said, NNW is really good … but I feel like something is missing.

A newcomer on the scene, Gruml, is like porting Google Reader into a Mac interface, but not making is a SSB. Half-way between NetNewsWire and Google Reader, Gruml is pretty interesting. It’s close, but not quite. And this is where I’m stuck.

It’s like we need a new reader. Once, like Dare suggests, allows subscription (and unsubscription) with a click. We need a connector to the rest of our friends, so I can share items with them, read items they share with me, and set the whole “like” thing as just a passing comment. I’d like to be able to skim headlines with a bit of text and then be able to mark that entire group read and move on. Writing a quick post or sending to Posterous should be a quick command, type a bit, and move on.

I think the metaphors of a newspaper/magazine or email client as readers can’t handle the amount of information people like Marshall and I (and many others) need to do our jobs. It also sounds like the folks at RWW have a good thing going there, but I gather they aren’t going to share their golden goose RSS app set up–though I think there could be something there worth paying for.

I’ve set the stage for part 2 of the post, which I still need to mull a bit, which is the “okay what would it look like” post. For now I’m going to look at the readers that have worked for me and the ones that have not (and why). See if I can find a common thread there. In the meantime, leave a comment below with your thoughts on RSS readers. Maybe together we can help picture a new app for all of us.