Dylan Greene’s 10 reasons on why RSS is not ready for prime time are interesting but I still believe that RSS is the way the browsing experience is moving. Away from surfing and towards sucking in the headlines.
Besides that, it just feels good to have your RSS Feeder suck in info from all your favourite sites in a few seconds. It just feels good. Like Neo downloading a fighting program. Wooo … Hey . . I know the latest BBC news.
Just feels good!
Dylan Greene on RSS
so what RSS Feeder do people recommend?
RSS is one of the ways forward for the web I think. I use FeedMe for MacOSX (lives in the dock) but found that I often wasn’t near my computer when I wanted to check stuff.
The beauty of something like RSS is that you can pull the content down and then use it how you want – so I made a web page on my blog that has keeps all my RSS feeds in one place – now I can check them at a single glance while at a cafe or on a friend’s PC. (Pretty geeky, I know)
I remember, back in the mid 90’s a great screensaver (forgot the name) that used “push” technology to download headlines and stories, sports, news, weather, entertainment, etc. and even had a “campus” version that would allow campus websites to post information (such as school closings due to hurricanes – I went to New Orleans Baptist Seminary, we had a few). Now, if I could only find a screensaver that would use the images and text from all the websites in my aggregator! THAT would be COOL! RSS still has a few problems… for instance, I use AmphetaDesk which makes a webpage from all the feeds I subscribe to… some of them, I see the images, some of them I don’t (mine, for instance, does NOT display images)… why, I don’t know… but it seems like there’d be some standardization there!!!
The screensaver that BrotherPhil mentions was called PointCast (or at least, PointCast did most of what was mentioned).
I’m actually writing a screensaver (in Java) called Funnel that fetches images from RSS feeds & displays them (I want to use it with Gallery).
In the next version I was planning on building a text module, but I just ran across a very impressive RSS screensaver that mixes a local directory of pictures with headlines, so I might do that instead. Unfortunately, the screensaver I found requires $ to use, so I’ll keep developing mine.