A first look at Shaun Inman’s “Fever”
Twitter and the blogs have been abuzz today over Shaun Inman's newest creation, called Fever. Some of you may be familiar with Shaun's previous creation, Mint, a really nifty blog stats package that you host yourself. Inman is on familiar ground this time with Fever, creating a spiffy feed reader, full of AJAX-y goodness, suitable for hosting on your own website.
I've been a regular Google Reader user for years now, occasionally trying out other readers... there was that fling with Feedlounge, before it went under, and occasional dalliances with NewsGator's line of readers... but I've always gone back to Google Reader. I took a look at Inman's demo of Fever, though, over on feedafever.com, and knew it was time to give it a try.
Does the world really need another feed reader, anyway?
Creating a new RSS feed reader is no simple task. Taking accepted existing designs and improving on them requires creativity and good ideas about usability. Inman is on the right track here. But aside from the UI design, Inman has created a dual-purpose tool. On one hand, Fever is a traditional feed reader. You subscribe, it updates the feeds, you read. On the other hand, though, Fever is something like your own personal Digg. You can subscribe to all those noisy feeds, those linkdump feeds that occasionally have something interesting in them, and identify them as "Sparks". Then Fever will aggregate them, pick out the hot topics, and present them to you in a "Hot" category, grouping them around a specific topic or link. This, to me, looks like the really slick part of Fever.
After the jump: my experience with installing Fever, importing my feed list, and some thoughts on usability and performance.
