Why I Am Fed Up With RSS Readers

“It’s just like your own custom newspaper, where you get to pick your favorite wire services!”

That’s what I’ve heard about RSS for years now, and while I have become a big fan of RSS and the many things it lets you do (like Pirillo’s spiffo gada.be service), I have to say that I’m becoming more and more dissatisfied with RSS Readers and am starting to get concerned that the lack of innovation in these vital tools is going to start hampering our efforts to disseminate these tools to a wider audience.

One big issue for me is that none of them seem to help me avoid duplication of content. You probably see this too: you catch up with a particular feed, but next time you check it, some of the very same articles show up as “new” again. Why?

Similarly, the never-ending debate about full versus partial RSS feeds is really pretty daft since the ideal solution should appear within the reader, as Apple’s Safari demonstrates but no one else seems to have picked up on.

The underlying problem is that RSS Readers just aren’t improving, they’re getting more boring and corporate. But without a gain in functionality.

What do you use to read RSS, and what do you think of it?

[tags]rss,newsgator,bloglines,rss readers,gada.be[/tags]