I'm interested in knowing what do you use, and what could be improved.
If you don't use one, why not? And what do you use for aggregation of content, if anything?
Open source and works wonderfully well. Also, easy to mod. I put in a Pinboard.in sharing link for all my articles, and you can do the same with just about any service in a few minutes with PHP.
There will always be duplicate links fr different news sources, like Techmeme, Techcrunch, Hacker News and such pointing to the same article source. All if want is for those to be grouped together so I don't have to be exposed to the same article multiple times while scrolling through the feed.
It lacks what all RSS feeds seem to lack - a "mark all up to here as read" feature.
If I have 1000 unread items in a stream and I leaf through 200 of them I want to right click and article and mark all chronologically preceding articles as read. Nothing seems to do that.
I use Google Reader and I like most of its features. It lacks the aforementioned :)
It has a couple of other features that makes it very efficient to keep up with many feeds
- mark an individual item as read both in the snapshot view (using a long press) and detailed view (you can also mark all items as read/unread)
- "close" feeds that you want to read later; the screen space is used more efficiently
- see the count of unread items posted today for all feeds in a group at once (I find this very useful)
On iOS the following are must have features: * swipe to next article * preload RSS articles and linked content for offline access and faster browsing of content
Byline is currently the best RSS reader on iOS, but it has a lot of shotcomings: * No Next Unread button or gesture (NetNewsWire does, but is otherwise a horrible, horrible app. Avoid like the plague.) * Slow compared to Reeder * Only shows last 1000 RSS items * No gestures for navigation like Reeder * Uses an effing dropdown menu in portrait mode AND does not hold state for the menu * Some feeds with special characters are not correctly in folder, but dumped in the All Items folder
I would actually prefer to use Reeder, but Reeder is terrible for actually reading RSS. Skimming RSS feeds yes, reading actual articles no. Whoever thought that a pull or push gesture to navigate to the previous/next RSS item was a good idea should have their head examined.
Somebody really needs to write the perfect RSS reader for iOS by combining the best features of Byline and Reeder + that missing Next Unread button.
I moved from Bloglines to Google Reader due to Bloglines inability to keep state, unavailability and lack of development. Generally Google Reader has been ok, but I originally preferred Bloglines and moved over only when it was obvious I had to due to the demise of Bloglines.
Google Reader's web interface is OKish on the desktop, but absolutely horrible on any mobile device, hence the need for a native iOS app.
If you're building an RSS reader, I suggest you build one that filters out all the garbage and only shows me what I should really read. I honestly don't think we need "yet another RSS reader". Having some sort of algo to rank the content could be a good way to differentiate yourself.
The only problem with it is RSS2Email sometimes sends duplicate messages for some reason. It also doesn't offer the capability to filter messages out of the feed. If I need to do anything like that I just bounce through Yahoo Pipes.
I ported my Instapaper articles as a RSS feed, so if I want to read something later I'll do that through GReader. So if you could find a way to take out that step, although it isn't really a big deal.
Also on my phone I've accidentally hit "mark all as read" a few times, which is really frustrating when I've lost hundreds of items that I wanted to read. There's way to undo that, which is depressing.
Frankly I'm a little surprised that not everyone on here is using a RSS reader. It just seems like such an efficient way to get new content. So much of what I read now comes through it instead of typing in nytimes.com or something or using a bookmark, especially since I find myself on a lot of different computers.
I really hope RSS feeds never go away as they are so essential to me. But it's a thing that never really seemed to catch on with the non-geek public, even though it so obviously makes sense for everyone to use.
Don't overthink what I meant with professional use, though, mainly it's just people using a reader with 10 times the feeds a regular user would have, and perhaps sharing their account with other people to go through unread content more quickly.
What could be improved? Well, access to protected, private feeds that require authentication would be good. The problem is, of course, that the workarounds for Google Reader to access private feeds (http://lifehacker.com/5432277/access-password+protected-feed... and http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/subscribe-to-authen...) kind of worry me.
It's very useful because the RSS feeds are treated like email. You can mark individual items as read, important, tagged, and so on. As well, you can use the email client's normal search features to search for text in the content. I use this feature a lot to categorise interesting topics.
The plugin (and claws) are open-source written in C++ if you are looking for ideas.
BTW, I use it to read HN. HN's RSS feed only offers topics that have been voted up (I think), so I see only worthwhile topics. Helps sorting the wheat from the chaff.
However if I did decide to start using an rss reader again I would look for a native desktop app that did the whole river of news thing well and had some kind of notification system.
Since I was not completely satisfied by it, I recently coded a simple RSS reader in Rails. It's really bare-bone and requires a lot of polishing, but it works.
Now it requires some love for implementing many of the ideas presented in this thread (duplicates, tagging & bayesian categorization, proper bookmarking, presenting only fresh news), but I don't have much time for it :(
The only reason why I don't use Google Reader on iOS via browser is because it doesn't support sharing and emailing articles well.
One downside of Reeder app on iPad is the inability to access starred posts and shared contents to look back at articles.
Instapaper is actually a pretty good alternative on iOS. I like its UI.
Also tried Early Edition when it got much hype but quickly retired it. Too clunky and doesn't mesh content well.
Main thing I'd like is the smarts to filter out stories which are essentially the same, but perhaps not exactly the same.
Oh, and if I bookmark/star something, then next time the same story comes up, highlight that I've already seen it, or even suppress it.
I've been wanting to implement this into Vienna for years now, but time and OBJ-C knowledge has been the main barriers.
Reederapp guy, if you are listening, please add this to Reeder as it really is the perfect interface bar this one feature.
Livejournal for feeds I'd like to see the day they are updated. Biggest complaint is sometimes it's super laggy and won't update for a few days, then spam feed with all updates.
Mobile: http://wap.netvibes.com/ ipad: http://ipad.netvibes.com/
Missing features: - Mothball feeds I'm not reading lately but might want to pick back up in the future. - Topical aggregation of feeds/posts. - De-duping.
Not sure if I'd pay extra or switch readers for any of those features, however.
It lacks the ability to block multiple instances of the same article (from the same or different feeds).
It lacks the ability to to block by pattern (I really don't care about articles about Justin or Selena).
the "stream view" is good because the next 20 item in the stream is always loaded (images, videos, etc).
i subscribe to ~300 feeds and updating 300 feeds every 5 minutes would be quite painful on my slow dsl connection.
i don't like that there's no logic in it that would hide stuff i'm not interested it, kinda like a trainable priority inbox. but i couldn't imagine a convenient way for me to set that up anyway...