I am dumbfounded at this point.  I love RSS; I love the all the news at your fingertips ability it gives you.  However, I hate RSS readers.  Every single one I’ve tried has had a feature that really turned me off to it.  I’ve tried a lot of news readers and there is always something about them.  Be it a system resource hog, a pop-up production system, or just down right not fun to use.

Google Reader was a possible player but lets face it; I’m not going to sit there all day with a browser window open.  I want a program running in the background actively telling me about significant events.  The one thing I really did like about Google Reader was the Gods-eye view of the news that it gave you on the main page.  All the recent news stacked up and aggregated in one place.

What I look for in a news reader hasn’t been found yet.  I want a slim program with not too many whistles and bells; easy on system resources.  I want the ability to highly organize a myriad of feeds and get the overall Gods-eye view or mere sub-section Lords-eye view.  I also would like the ability to set notifications up on a per feed or per sub-section basis.  Meaning that I don’t want hundreds of notification boxes filling up my screen every five minutes.  I want notification boxes when I ask for them; no sooner, no later.

I haven’t been using a reader on a daily basis for quite some time now.  I think it’s obvious by my lack of writing.  Right now, I’m configure Outlook 2007 for RSS reading but it appears to be more of the same stuff I don’t want.  At least it’s built in to my e-mail program (and yes, I’ve tried Thunderbird and despised it).

Apparently, I’m asking for too much.  I’m not a programmer or I’d write it myself, GPL it, and be on my merry little way.  I’ve yet to find one newsreader that can give me what I want.  Any ideas?

Tags: rss, feed reader, newsreader, feeds