Alternative News Readers

Question

I have used Google Reader until some point, but got really really tired of using it. It only takes a couple of days of a break to accumulate the dreaded "1000+" unread items, at which point I have to either declare RSS bankruptcy and mark all items as "read" or read through them all to see if I missed anything major and interesting.

Hence I'm searching for an alternative to handle a lot of high-traffic subscriptions.

Recently I've come across Newsmap, which is conceptually close to what I'm looking for. However it's still in beta and only pulls Google News headlines.

Are you aware of any other non-traditional news readers, that do not resemble a regular RSS reader and can potentially pull content from RSS and/or various social media sites? I'm open to ideas.

P. S.

I am also open to various Twitter utilities that will help to filter a Twitter stream and improve its signal-to-noise ratio (it's pretty terrible as it is).

Answer 1

I am also open to various Twitter utilities that will help to filter a Twitter stream and improve its signal-to-noise ratio (it's pretty terrible as it is).

Have a look at ReadTwit

Readtwit filters your twitter feed to links only, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading software / service to read twitter posted content along with the rest of your feeds.

Duplicate links in the same time-frame are grouped together. No more retweets overwhelming your link browsing activity.

Are you aware of any other non-traditional news readers, that do not resemble a regular RSS reader and can potentially pull content from RSS and/or various social media sites? I'm open to ideas.

feedly is a good option(though it's a Firefox addon )

feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.

Answer 2

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6_ways_to_filter_your_rss_feeds.php

Yahoo! Pipes looks the most promising, and it allows a significant amount of control over your criteria. I haven't used it, but from the looks of it, it appears to allow you to use whatever fields are available in the RSS file as criteria - meaning that if the RSS file contains tags in some fashion (the S[OFU] ones do) it will be a lot easier to filter your feeds.

I would also take a good long look at what you read on a regular basis and what you do not. It may not even be such a bad idea to segregate your blogs into items to read regularly, and items to read on a rainy day.

Finally, some sites offer a summary post of what's been going on in the last week. Places like Lifehacker, etc do this. You could conceivably use Yahoo! Pipes or similar to filter out everything but the summary posts - that way you'd be down to one or two summary posts per blog per week.

Answer 3

I just started using the Omeo Reader from Jetbrains, and it seems to do pretty well. Haven't had it long enough to give it a full review, though.