David Russell

Mere hours after I posted the entry on Monday evening, the Newshutch team announced that they were pulling the plug. Stangely, I did not see the announcement until this morning when I pulled up Newshutch to delete all my feeds. Instead of my feeds, there was a message informing me that Newshutch was no more. There was a single option: export feeds into OPML. Well, I had done that on Monday to begin loading feeds into potential candidates. So Newshutch is done. I’m really sorry to see it go. It was the best web-based feed reader in the world. I hope the developers consider releasing the source as open, or at least packaging things up to sell.

I took the advice of my friends who commented earlier this week. The was near-vehement support of Google Reader. Everyone tended to agree that Google had really upped the ante on Reader since the early days. I had seen enough of the current version to know that Reader would be robust enough to handle my frantic reading style. There are just two things I don’t like about Google:

1. Their apps really are not beautiful. Functional, yes. Pretty, no. And design does matter. It is one of the reasons Newshutch attracted me.
2. I have know idea what Google is going to do to me once they own my data (essentially, my data is me.) Conspiracy theories aside, it is still a little scary. (You can call me crazy if it makes you feel better about your overt trust in Google.)
3. It takes a long time to initially load my 100 feeds.

But I love:

1. The mobile feature.
2. And the mobile feature.

The other reader mentioned in the comments was Netvibes. (Thanks, David Song.) I ran into them about two years ago. They had a neat start page thing going in the days when start pages were big. (I guess they are still popular, I just haven’t logged into mine in ages. My reader has always been my “anchor” tab—-the first tab open in my browser.) Today, Netvibes is extremely mature. I was shocked at the work they have invested and, more importantly, the product they have pushed out. It would not surprise me at all if Netvibes is acquired by one of the larger companies, particularly Yahoo! who seems so fond of trendy web applications.

For me, Netvibes can’t really cut it as a reader. I tried to set it up. And I liked the one “Reader” view (widget) they have. But I couldn’t figure out how to directly mimic the UI of Google and Newshutch where feeds appear on the left and full text entries appear on the right. Netvibes Reader could display one feed like that, but I couldn’t figure out how to list my feeds appropriately. I am sure I am missing something, but no web search could help me find a straight answer.

There was one other mention, Bloglines. Sorry. Bloglines is a piece of crap. It always has been. It might just always be. I do appreciate Aaron chiming in though. My apologies for my opposition to your reader-of-choice.

So for now, I’ll use Google Reader. Luckily, I found a nice theme for their reader. It was designed by the famous Jon Hicks and will vastly improve the UI. We’ll see where it goes from here.

It may sound silly, but a good RSS reader can really make reading feeds delightful. I like good experiences. The most amazing thing about this hunt was how frustrating it was to find so few good web-based readers. Perhaps the team at Newshutch was right when they pointed out the struggle they faced in creating a good reader. Evidently, it is quite a challenge to do this right.

[tags]rss, feed, reader, newshutch, google, netvibes[/tags]