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.

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Virb, a social network that melds some of the customization options seen on MySpace with a mature and media-heavy atmosphere, has just launched a completely overhauled version of its service. The new site sports a very attractive new interface, reworked backend, and new social features that make it an impressive upgrade to the original, which launched in 2007. In conjunction with Virb’s reintroduction, hosting provider MediaTemple has annouced that it has set up a new venture platform called (mt) Ventures, which acquired Virb last summer and has also acquired and invested in several other projects.

Virb originally launched its social network in 2007 as something of an experiment, and has since grown to a user base of around 250,000 users, including many musicians who use the site to share their music and find fans. But its developers say that they weren’t quite ready to keep up with the site’s growth, nor could they adapt quickly enough to encourage new waves of users. So rather than try to tweak the codebase they’d created, the Virb team decided to start anew, and have spent the last 18 months rebuilding their social network into something much more robust than its previous incarnation.

Rather than try to replace the dominant players in the social network space, the Virb team acknowledges that most people have already established online presences at other social networks like MySpace and Facebook. They explain that Virb is meant to help fill the gap left by these other networks, and is meant as enhancement – not a replacement – to those networks users may already belong to.

To reflect this, the site’s biggest addition is a social activity aggregator comparable to FriendFeed, but with a social network wrapped around it. Users can import photos from Flickr, stories from their RSS reader, and other content from the growing number of social sites on the web with an API. But many of these activities can also be accomplished using Virb itself – for example, it has a rich music player/sharing tool and photo galleries, putting a strong emphasis on media sharing. These features are meant to attract new Virb users who may not already have fulfilled these needs elsewhere, without alienating those who have.

The site has also expanded on the ‘Friends List’ concept found on Facebook. Dubbed ‘Circles’, the site lets users separate their friends into groups. Users can then choose to selectively show items in their News Feed from a certain Circle of friends, allowing them to quickly weed through the updates they don’t care about. Eventually the site will also allow users to send a photo or event invitation to a certain Circle, without having to worry about any privacy settings they may have previously set for those friends.

Another major improvement is the abilty for users to ’skin’ their profiles. Previously the site has supported full HTML customization (and continues to) but many users don’t know how to use it. Skins are similar to WordPress themes, in that they can totally change the appearance of a profile – these aren’t just color palette swaps. The new skins allow users to differentiate themselves, and also allow users to drag-and-drop widgets in their profiles to rearrange their layouts. Such customization can come at a price, as evidenced by many annoyingly distracting and ugly profiles on MySpace. Virb used to get around this issue by offering a button at the top of every page that allowed users to turn the customization off for the profile they were viewing. But the company says that because its demographic tends to skew towards a more mature audience, few people ever used it it so they took it out (they promise to reintroduce it should the need arise).

Virb’s biggest challenge will in the fact that it is yet another social network, swimming in a vast sea of competitors struggling to catch up to the likes of Bebo, MySpace, and Facebook. Granted, Virb has built up a userbase of over 250,000, including many musicians keen on sharing their music, but they’ve still got a long way to go. And while Virb’s emphasis on media may differentiate it in some ways from those major players, there are other sites like Multiply with a similar media bent. That said, the site looks really nice, so I wouldn’t count these guys out by any means.

Disclosure: MediaTemple is TechCrunch’s hosting provider and is a TC sponsor.

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I spoke to the Grid Server team yesterday. The podcast of the conversation is up at TalkCrunch.

Media Temple’s Grid-Server is a completely new hosting platform that replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. We’ve eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email. The Grid’s on-demand scalability means you’ll always be ready for intense bursts of traffic; and the growing audience resulting from your online success. All of this power, controlled through our brand new AccountCenter, is available today for a price point unmatched by any competing service.

Customer sites are not hosted on a single (dedicated, shared or virtual) machine. Instead, they are managed by hundreds of clustered servers, and Media Temple monitors the health of the entire grid as well as individual sites. If a site spikes in traffic, performance is unaffected and the site owner will simple be charged for overage on bandwidth and CPU usage. If the grid begins to get stressed, Media Temple simply adds more machines.

Overage pricing hasn’t been put up on the site at the time of writing this post (and it’s important of course), although the company says that the basic package specs compare very favorably with low end dedicated server hosting at $200/month.

They’ve also added a number of other features to make hosting setup and maintenance as easy as possible for the novice, including one-click setup of Wordpress, Drupal, Gallery, ZenCart and other applications.

Mosso (part of Rackspace) is an existing competing service that is comparable to much of what Media Temple is doing with Grid Server; however, Mosso starts at 5x the price, $100/month. The basic Mosso package offers slightly less storage and twice the bandwidth offered by Grid Server.

Grid Server can also be compared to Amazon’s new EC2 utility computing service, which we discussed in the podcast. The Media Temple team was quick to point out that EC2 isn’t really designed to deal with permanent virtual server configurations, and lacks customer service and the auto burst capabilities of Grid Server.

As a disclosure, we use Media Temple for some of our hosting (we have a couple of dedicated servers with them). Frankly Grid Server may be a better choice for us. We have a ton of excess capacity to handle traffic spikes, which we pay for whether or not we use.

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