Peter Cooper 18 Mar 05

The RSS reader stats I see always depress me. It’s sad that not more people are using the almost-perfect NewsFire. :-( NetNewsWire is so icky. Interesting that, despite being Mac software, it gets 17.9% though.

James 'Smiler' Farrer 18 Mar 05

How many people are not using the feed?

paul haine 18 Mar 05

The ‘Live Bookmark’ feature of Firefox is fairly poor, but it’s what I’m stuck using at work because I can’t install anything else. If it at least could notify you when there were updates instead of making you click through each bookmark to look then it would be better.

Brian 18 Mar 05

Surpised more people don’t use Thunderbird. I have replaced using outlook with it and replaced my RSS reader with it.

If you haven’t tried it out you should give it a shot.

Kenny G 18 Mar 05

I use www.kinja.com. Check it out.

Peter Flaschner 18 Mar 05

Another Blogliner here. No software to install, and always up to date, whether I’m checking in from my mac, my pc, or even my treo.

Dan Boland 18 Mar 05

How many people are not using the feed?

I don’t. I gave NNW a shot for a day or two, but I’m so used to the routine of using bookmarks to visit my blogs that I ended up still doing it even though I had a feed reader. Though I will admit, Bloglines sounds pretty sweet.

Kevin Gnuman 18 Mar 05

I’m with Brian on this. I use Thunderbird’s RSS manager/reader, and I’m a big fan.

I’m kind of surprised I don’t hear more about it?

Jesse Kochis 18 Mar 05

I use BottomFeeder, no real reason.

Reed Wiedower 18 Mar 05

Wow. I find it really odd less than 132 people are using Feedreader…(http://sourceforge.net/projects/feedreader/). Unless, of course, most visitors to this site aren’t on win32 platforms, in which case they should all be using NewsFire, as Peter Cooper mentioned.

The Firefox plugin is just too awkward for my use. And I can’t break down and move to a web-based application yet. Why? Mainly because bloglines doesn’t support folders. Yes, yes, I know, folders are unnecessary…but I find organizing my rdf feeds much more useful than organizing my mail.

Adam Michela 18 Mar 05

Sage owns me.

Ryan Schroeder 18 Mar 05

Is this only people that have subscribed recently? If I’ve been reader our feed from before Feedburner I’m I included in the stats?

Jon S 18 Mar 05

@Reed - Bloglines does have folders/subfolders. I have all my feeds organized into blogs, opinion, news, technews, oftheday etc.

It’s not the most intuitive interface for creating folders but once they’re setup it’s easy to use. It even remembers which folders have been expanded / not expanded between visits.

Bloglines is amazing.

Dan Boland 18 Mar 05

I just signed up for Bloglines and tried it out. The interface is way too clunky for me. 37BetterBloglines, perhaps?

pb 18 Mar 05

FeedDemon, Bloglines and NetNewsWire are definitely the best on their respective platforms. I personally find Bloglines painful to use as a web interface simply isn’t appropriate for the efficiency that RSS can bring. I suspect that Bloglines ranks artificially high because it registers a ping even if you no longer use Bloglines.

The NewsFire “river of news” approach is also not well-suited for RSS.

A bit surprised that NewsGator shows up although, like NNW and FD, it’s not free. I prefer a standalone app tailored to feed reading myself and don’t see the benefit of email client integration.

Lisa 18 Mar 05

How many people are not using the feed?

I don’t. I’m just accustomed to looking at everything throught the browser.

Brian 18 Mar 05

I don’t know how people use the Firefox Livelines, I couldn’t stand it. Firefox users should try the Sage extension or even better switch to Bloglines. I use a PC at work and a Mac and a PC at home so it’s a godsend.

Jake 18 Mar 05

I stopped using thunderbird, because it was giving me duplicates of everything. This was a 1.(early)x release. I assume it’s better now?

JD McMillan 18 Mar 05

I’ve been using Sage, liking reading the feeds in the browser instead of with another app. Only problem is that Sage can’t seem to remember which items I’ve read/haven’t read in the Feed Item List. When I come back to a feed, all the items refresh and are marked as unread. Anyone else have this problem? Anyone know how to fix it?

Peter Cooper 18 Mar 05

pb said: The NewsFire �river of news� approach is also not well-suited for RSS.

What do you mean? The reason I prefer NewsFire over all the rest is because “all the rest” are trying to be like e-mail programs. RSS is not e-mail, and isn’t a replacement for e-mail!

NewsFire gives me a stream of RSS items sorted however I want (thanks to smart feeds), letting me open the ones I want, see which ones are important to me, and then marking everything “as read” and removing it forever. I don’t want to store RSS items or read them like e-mail. I want them in, digested as rapidly as possible, and then out of my life.. after all, a few hundred more items are going to be rolling through over the next 24 hours.. :)

Perhaps this is just evidence that RSS is something different for everyone, but I certainly couldn’t see the benefit of using something like an e-mail client or a Web browser to handle a torrent of items I want to digest ASAP. (I read about 100 feeds and can process them within two minutes at the start of each day, opening up what I want to read, then killing the rest)

Chris S 18 Mar 05

Firefox/Sage and also Tbird user here.

bernie 18 Mar 05

Not sure that NNW is trying to be more of an Email reader. Personally, I am addicted to the integrated browser with TABS.

While “It positively drips with OS X beauty…” i kinda feel slimed by it. Too much of a good thing?

pb 18 Mar 05

The river approach is way to disjointed. Think of a newspaper that had all the articles randomly strewn throughout. It’d be a nightmare even if you were intending to read the whole paper anyway. It’s much more effective to get in the mental mindset for each topic. Two minutes for 100 feeeds sounds like you aren’t getting anything out of it.

Eric 19 Mar 05

@Andrew

By chance do you mean FeedMarker rather than FeedMaker? I was unable to find FeedMaker, but FeedMarker seems like it might be what you briefly describe.

paul haine 19 Mar 05

To all those suggesting bloglines - I’m sure it’s great, but it’s blocked at work thanks to Websense, so I’m pretty much stuck with the Firefox Live Bookmarks, despite their shortcomings.

paul haine 21 Mar 05

Ignore that, I’m now using Sage. It’s nice, but it’s slooowwww.

Dan 20 Apr 05

I’ve been thinking about this, and know very few people will read this comment because the post is so old (more than a month), but here goes:

It is so weird design folk like 37s and the rest of you use NetNewsWire or any of the rss-readers. I like going to the actual web pages in my browser to see the designs of the sites I find interesting. I can understand that NetNewsWire or the others are maybe well designed applications, and that some people prefer that, but as far as web as an art form… the content really ought to be in context.

Just some random thoughts that came way too late.