For something to be wrong, there must, neccessarily, be something that is right. When Dave says that RSS Readers Are Designed Wrong, he implies that there is a right way to design them, and the lack of qualifiers and means that there is one right way. Unfortunately, Dave contradicts his own theory in the second line of his post when he says “One of the first rules of software design is also the primary rule of business — ‘The user is always right.’”
In order to square that statement, with the statement that an RSS reader is “designed wrong” if it’s not River of News, requires every customer to want the exact same things that Dave does. For most people this would be a patently silly notion. Dave would likely explain this away by saying that people who don’t agree with him just haven’t seen the light. They haven’t come around to the most correct, best way to to use RSS (his).
Let’s hit some quotes…
Dave: “Most RSS readers remind the user, all the time, how wrong he or she is. Or inadequate or lazy or behind in their work.”
No. The RSS readers that Dave is talking about remind the user, all the time, how many unread items there are. If the user gets down about this and imputes meaning upon that little bold number, that is the user’s fault, not the software’s, and it means that that piece of software is probably not right for that user. (Or maybe the user needs to subscribe to fewer feeds)
Dave: I read so few articles that I want my software to work differently
The percentage of articles I read varies by feed (and for most of them, the percentage is extremely high), so I use my software in a manner consistent with that. (See below for more detail) But the bottom line is that for most of my feeds I do want to read every item, and River of News leaves me feeling like I missed something. When I’ve used River of News readers before I spend a lot of time checking them because I don’t want to miss anything important. This is troublesome for me.
Dave: No need to count the number of articles that didn’t get my attention. It’s a useless piece of data.
Counting the number of articles that didn’t get your attention may, in fact, be useless. But that’s not what the “Unread” count tells you. It tells you how many articles you haven’t decided whether or not to pay attention to yet. Once you decide on that, you either read it or don’t, and then mark it as read. It’s a very valuable number.
How EOW Reads RSS
I use NewsGator, and I love it. I have my feeds split up into folders based on topic, and interest level. There are several hundred feeds split up into a dozen or so folders (I’d love NG even more if I could use tags instead of folders, but that’s a different quibble).
There are a selection of folders that I simply do not want to miss any items from. Friends, respected tech blogs with extremely high signal-to-noise, some diagnostic feeds, etc. This is a generally small number of feeds, and it’s always what I hit first.
I have another group of folders that are “skim only” — and I use them in the most river-of-news-like way I can: I tell NewsGator to show me those folders with titles only. If a title grabs my attention, I read the full article. If not, *poof*.
There are folders in between those two extremes, also, that I read at varying levels of detail depending how much time I have. The ones closer to the “top”, I will, at the very least, skim them to get the good stuff. The ones closer to the “skim only” level can be disregarded if I’m busy or overloaded.
I will grant that if I had the ability to view a folder-worth of feeds as a true River of News, I would use that feature and add more feeds that I was mildly interested in, but didn’t care terribly much about… but I care too much about the info contained in those OTHER feeds to chance missing something going by on the river while I was taking a nap.