Craig Koster

Fever Reviewed

I’ve been using a desktop feed reader (NewsLife) for quite a while. While it’s worked very well I have always been hesitant to add too many new feeds as I didn’t want to feel overwhelmed with unread items. Today, Shaun Inman released an online feed reader named Fever that promises to help you deal with “feed clutter” by smartly analyzing which of your main feeds are “hot”.

After watching the introductory video I decided to take a chance and plunk down my $30 for Fever. Setting up an account and purchasing Fever was fairly easy although there were more steps involved than most people would be used to when purchasing an app online.

The install for Fever went pretty well. Although there were a few different steps to be followed the instructions were laid out nicely and easy to understand. The install is similar to Wordpress in that there is a check to make sure your environment can support Fever and after you’ve purchased your license an automated install program sets everything up for you.

My first task was to import my list of feeds and that worked nicely as well. For reference, I only have about forty feeds so we’re not talking a large number here but I didn’t see any flaws with the import process. All imported feeds are put into the ‘Kindle’ category which designates them as “must read” or important feeds. I moved some of the lesser read feeds and link based feeds to the ‘Sparks’ category. Fever uses feeds in this category to help determine which feeds are “hot”.

The user interface in Fever is fantastic. It really moves the bar up a notch for rich web applications. Keyboard shortcuts are nicely integrated into the app which makes the switch from a desktop reader to a web reader much less painful.

So far the only bad thing I’ve encountered with Fever is that I really don’t have enough feeds for it to work as it’s intended. Fever depends on having many feeds to formulate which ones are hot and only having forty feeds is kind of limiting Fever’s ability to tell me what I should be reading. Over time I anticipate accumulating more feeds, though, as I’ll be less hesitant to subscribe to a feed to avoid clutter.

Most of the complaints I’ve seen so far have had to do with the fact that there is no online demo and that the application needs to be hosted on one’s own server. These are fair complaints as plunking down your $30 without actually being able to try the app is a bit disconcerting. There is a nice introductory video up on the Fever site that shows how Fever works, but most people (myself included) want to be able to “try before you buy”. I’d also anticipate that there will eventually be a hosted version. As far as I can tell, Shaun is running this whole deal by himself so initially offering only a self-hosted version may be a smart move to avoid having too big a launch that he wouldn’t be able to handle.

I’ve taken a few screenshots of Fever in action if you’d like to get an idea of what it looks like.

I’ve only been using Fever for a couple hours now but it’s growing on me steadily. The move from a desktop reader to a web based reader was a bit uncomfortable at first but I’m getting used to it. From a user experience perspective, Fever really shines and as I accumulate more feeds I expect the application to become more and more useful. The goal is to have Fever become less of a reader and more of an advisor in terms of what I should devote my time and attention to. We’re all pressed for time and the habit of poring through your reader to examine every unread item is growing increasingly inefficient. I’m impressed with Fever so far and I’m going to give it a shot as my main reader for the next few weeks.

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009