Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbwzt2 | Hacker News Reader

So... alternatives?

I don't use Buzz, so the problems mentioned in the article aren't an issue for me, but I was getting frustrated with Google Reader for plain usability reasons, and also have unrelated privacy concerns with it, in the sense that at some point I assume Google is going to start doing user tracking to see what you read, how long you look at particular items, and so forth (not for any malicious reason but purely because they can probably somehow make money from it (ala http://www.newsweek.com/id/233773)).

I tried a bunch of different RSS readers for Linux and disliked all of them, so I ended up writing a RSS to email script that pulls down my feeds and sends me mail for new entries. I actually find this much more usable than Reader or any standalone reader - mutt (or sup if you prefer) is already is built for handling lots of information, and especially handy for sites like hacker news where I can just scan titles in the index and delete-delete-delete and pull up the occasional interesting story. Also reduces random 'wonder if anything good is new on reddit/hn' polling, so I'm finding it to be a big productivity win.

My script is at http://www.randombit.net/code/grab_rss/

And there is of course also rss2email which is basically the same thing - http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/

I would strongly NOT recommand bloglines. There is no way to suppress your account, I mailed the team twice and never get any answer.

It's stated on the website they will answer in a few business days but they don't. I also found the blog post of someone having the same problem...

The RSS reader built into opera is great. I have been using it for a couple years and would not switch to anything else. I used to use reader but it is far to slow in comparison.

a friend recently launched feedingo.com - which is exactly that, a better google reader.

The trouble with that is that Reader is the Twitter of RSS readers. Why do I say that? Look at iPhone feed readers. Pretty much all of them use your Google Reader account to synchronize unread/read etc. so you don't have to read just on your phone. It's the API and data store for synchronized feed reading.

How many devices do you need to read your RSS feed on anyway? For me it's only my desktop machines and occasionally my phone. That's a pretty low barrier to entry for a new feed reader.

I'm not buying the huge ecosystem argument at all. The problem with the direction Google is taking—not to mention Twitter—is that there is a huge fad fun factor at work here. It's fun to play around with this stuff, but how much useful information can you get out of it? Sure, Twitter is some people's bread and butter (pro bloggers...), RSS is much more powerful for domain experts, for some people all they can really make use of is email.

Personally I think Google Buzz is too late to cash in on the Twitter fad. It's solving Google's business problem, not users'. It'll probably settle into its niche like the rest of Google's stuff, but they'll have to fix this heavy-handed integration stuff.

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