The biggest challenge of the Web is finding information you want. For a while, bookmarks sufficed, giving users an easy way to quickly return to their favorite sites. As bookmark lists grew, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) became the preferred tool of Internet power-users. An RSS reader makes it easy to track a large number of sites, but eventually, you’re subscribed to so many feeds that finding the good stuff becomes a challenge. Enter Fever, a Web-based RSS reader that tries to solve this info overload by sorting your news by importance.
Fever is Web-based--but it’s strictly BYOS (bring your own server). If you’re comfortable setting up blogging software like Movable Type or WordPress, installing Fever is a snap. Unfortunately, there’s no trial period or live demo, so you can’t really try before you buy.
Fever's Hot List is a great feature, but it can quickly get overrun by one or two high-traffic topics.
Fever’s killer feature is the Hot List, where stories are ranked by importance, rather than listed in chronological order. You’re asked to separate your feeds into Sparks or Kindling. Sparks are the sites that you read frequently. Kindling are sites that are less important, such as blogs that repost lots of links on your favorite topics. The Kindling concept encourages large numbers of subscriptions, which can improve your Hot List, without cluttering up your main view. Stories that get a lot of mentions across all your feeds rise quickly on the Hot List--a clever way of helping you find the most important news stories, and it works quite well with larger numbers of feeds.
Our biggest problem with Fever is the lack of granularity. We subscribe to tons of tech-related RSS feeds, but we’re also interested in other topics. But since the tech feeds outnumber the others, our Hot List is mostly tech news. You can use Fever as a traditional feed reader, grouping feeds into folders, but the Hot List feature does not apply to specific folders. Another solution could be setting up multiple profiles geared to different interests, each with its own Hot List, but Fever is strictly a single-user affair.
Hot List helps you find important stories fast. Clean interface. Lots of keyboard shortcuts.
Cannot limit Hot List to certain feeds or create multiple accounts. Limited by the speed and reliability of your Web host.
