Currently, I subscribe to just over 740 RSS/Atom feeds in Google Reader. This has replaced my old stand-by of NetNewsWire that I used forever. There’s two main reasons for this. First, it’s available and always synchronized, something NetNewsWire wasn’t at the time. More importantly, though, is the “social” aspect that it brings with sharing of links with my friends, as well as comments about those links. It’s helped me discover a lot of new things over the years.
One of the downsides of that many feeds is the sheer quantity of items that show up every day. It ranges from around 450 on a “slow” day to over 1,200 on a regular day. This makes it quite difficult to get through everything, and often I let some categories just languish until I just wipe them clean. Not useful! All that has changed based on a tweet by Jacob Kaplan-Moss that alerted me to a beautiful dedicated Google Reader application for the iPhone: Reeder.
So what makes Reeder such a pleasure to use?
- It is an iPhone app. I mean this in the sense that it behaves in a very touch-centric way, and has all the nice touches that a good iPhone application should have. Like Tweetie it has the physics in it’s UI that feels “right”.
- It’s reasonably fast. The first sync took a little bit of time — perhaps a minute over 3G — but after that it’s been quite fast for me.
- It works with other online services like Twitter, Instapaper and Delicious. It also let’s me share things with my friends on Google Reader.
- I keep discovering little touches that feel like presents. For example, swiping over an item let’s you mark it read without looking at it.
All told, for $2.99, it’s a bargain. On my 30 minute ride home, I was able to sift through about 750 links, read some, throw some at Instapaper for later and mark the rest as read. Highly recommend.
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I used to have 1200+ feeds and struggle to manage them. I would find myself either marking all as read, or skimming them so fast I’d miss good stuff. So I pruned my list on google reader to just the 20 – 30 feeds I care about every post in. The remaining feeds I built a side project for: http://readwarp.com. I probably won’t see every last post from them, but it does a fair job of trying to prioritize based on my tastes, and I like that I spend my time reading stories rather than skimming lists of stories.
Anyways, I’d love for you to try it out and tell me what you think. Over the months I’ve grown the set of feeds to just about everything imaginable. Especially in programming and technology I think readwarp has pretty good coverage; hopefully it’ll figure out subsets of feeds that you like really fast.