Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.
Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.”
The other refreshing feature of the app is its move away from email inbox-style unread counts. As a long-time Google Reader user, I always dreaded the experience of returning from an offline vacation only to find several thousand unread items in my reader. With Fever, the emphasis is on dividing subscriptions into two camps: must-reads (called Kindling) and everything else (Sparks). By moving the “hit-or-miss” feeds into the Sparks bin, Fever ensures that a user gets only the most relevant content.
I’ve been using the product for a little less than a week and it has yet to disappoint. I now feel like I’m always aware of the trending stories in my area of Internet interest. Furthermore, I’ve been able to subscribe to a number of high-volume feeds that I would have never added to my Google Reader. And since I added them as Sparks, they now help Fever’s algorithm better find the most interesting stories from my Kindling.
Fever is the newest product from designer/developer Shaun Inman: He is also the creator of Mint, a web site analytics suite (not to be confused with Mint, the financial site); Shortwave, a command line bookmarklet; and Horror Vacui, an 8-bit iPhone game.
Although Fever has fully replaced Google Reader as my everyday feed reader, there are two drawbacks to the app: its cost and its requirements. Fever costs $30 (there is no demo or trial available). It also requires self-hosting and self-installation. Ultimately, this will prevent widespread adoption.
A possible solution to increase mass appeal would be if a hosting company, e.g. Media Temple or Rackspace, were to offer a hosted version of Fever for a few dollars a month. Even better would be an ad-supported free version.
But in the end, Inman seems to be fine with a more targeted market:
The price for feed readers has bottomed out at free so anything more than that is going to turn certain people off. And I don’t mind the deterrent. Most products price to be inclusive, to make the most money possible. I designed Fever (like Mint) first and foremost for myself. Any money I make on top of the personal utility I get out of it is just icing on the cake.
I also support my customers personally. Anything I can do to keep that level of support manageable helps — especially with two commercial products.
Check out the demo video here.
Hi Dan,
I think its gonna be a service of great value for those who are subscribed to a lot of blogs. It could be overwhelming to sort through all the feeds manually. Fever will definitely help them out.
Thanks for a great post.
Mani Raj
Havoc Marketing
I’ve grown to really love Fever as a feed reader, but I haven’t found much use for the heat ratings of links yet. Maybe I just don’t subscribe to enough blogs, but it doesn’t ever seem to find anything of interest. My guess is that the behavior of linking inside posts is rarely to recommend other posts, and while multiple people might be talking about something interesting, it’s usually the commentary that I find most interesting, not the product that they were talking about.
Despite all that though, I’m still gonna keep using Fever as my main feed reader because it’s such a pleasure to use. Inman is a application design god.
I’ve found that adding link heavy feeds (think del.icio.us accounts) really helps with making the temperatures worthwhile.
Did I hear instant techmemes? …Shaun, since the tool is self-hosted, can you make the features of the tool public-facing, rather than in a private area?
I envision powering a techmeme for various niches, i.e. FashionMeme.com or something by simply loading it up with the sites/blogs you determine to be the most important in a niche.
What do you think Shaun?
Opening up certain parts of Fever would be fantastic.
That is pretty much, what I asked for in my article the other day.
Either opening up the whole application, or give users an opportunity to export your top list in something like a Wordpress Widget…
I think this is gonna be great. I like the feature “While it’s hot”. Nice post tho
no thanks, I am not gonna pay for feed reader, no way.
but the idea of fever is quite interesting
I agree the idea is really interesting, but a working demo is what I really want before I even consider spending $30 (which I think is a bit expensive). We’ll see how it works out.
The demo video was good enough for me.
Great idea, but there is no chance I’ll pay $$ for a feed reader when Google Reader does just fine for free. Fever looks quite impressive, but $30 for a self-hosted solution is unreasonable.
The problem I have with Google Reader is that it makes feed reading too much like email.
Have you ever tried Streamy? I use it everyday, every time, all the time! It’s better than Google Reader!
everyone should take a look at Feedly. it doesn’t get nearly enough attention considering how large and well implemented its feature set is.
the link to download it on the feedly homepage is broken. i won’t use software from a company who can’t even get a simple download link right
Love the idea, but for $30 I’m out.
I use Vienna for free on a Mac, but would love something that avoided 20000 unreads. Maybe for $10 if I could demo it first, but $30 is more than 90% of people would pay, even power readers….
No Demo = Dealbreaker
Setup your own cron-jobs? Come on people… Even at $30 a pop, I can’t imagine a lot of people are into getting that deep with system configs.
Cron-jobs are not that user-friendly, and especially with new-ish cloud hosting, cron-jobs are kind of an after-thought.
Although, this has some potential…
1. Make it free (charge for premium features)
2. Serve it themselves – wouldn’t take more than $5k/month
3. Mobile version
Another thought…. By hosting and setting it up yourself, does that user then need to setup their own backups and information storage? And does the user ever need to get into the database in order to configure the cron-jobs? Because not all hosting providers have fun interfaces to configure things with.
I am shocked by what is expected of potential customers of this product.
It did everything for me automatically.
And it manages your backups as well? Sets up your own cron-jobs?
That’s not what I heard.
There is an iPhone optimized version. Check out your Fever on the iPhone. It’s quite slick.
This sounds awesome. I am tired of google reader.
$30 + hosting + maintenance?? No thanks, you can keep it inclusive alright.
I have two licenses for Inman’s Mint, so I didn’t hesitate for a second to pick up a copy of Fever as well, and I must say, I haven’t been disappointed. He’s not kidding when he says that he handles customer support personally, since I emailed him with a problem (the blacklist functionality was confusing at first) and he emailed back within 24 hours to let me know that it would be fixed in the next version, which went live less than 24 hours after that.
If you’re the type of person that subscribes to hundreds of feeds and yet wants to be able to tell at a glance what’s worth looking at when you’ve only got a minute or two, then Fever is definitely for you. If you subscribe to less than 100 blogs, then stick with Google Reader.
“If you’re the type of person that subscribes to hundreds of feeds and yet wants to be able to tell at a glance what’s worth looking at when you’ve only got a minute or two, then Fever is definitely for you. If you subscribe to less than 100 blogs, then stick with Google Reader.”
Well-said Cory.
googlereader is a program i don´t understand it… can someone help me?
Google offers quite comprehensive documentation for most of their products.
Check out the Google Reader support documents.
We have also created a feed reader that has many of great features and even allows for pushing feed content to twitter
I took the Fever dive, even though I’m the author of my own feed reader, and found it to really cut down on the number of unread articles I dealt with while still getting me the stuff I think is important. The amount of repetition in feeds can be killer and Fever really solves that well.
Biggest problem is that you need to have domain *name* for Fever to run on – it’s not enough to run it on a computer and access via its IP address. As far as I can tell this is an anti-piracy tactic. Surely there must be better alternatives than this. Further to this – two emails to the author have gone unread in over 2 week. I’ll certainly be keeping my $30 and not dealing with this developer. Ever.
I just bought the license, and had an issue that was my hosts problem, not his. I emailed Shaun (yea we’re on a first name basis) and he got back to me within 24 hours.
You might want to try emailing him again.
I do like fever a lot, price aside. I’m writing my own little review right now, since finding a review before I made the plunge was pretty difficult.