I just discovered Feverº, a self-hosted RSS feed aggregator with a twist.
People are becoming aware of the power of reading RSS feeds through online feed (or news) aggregators like Google Reader and Bloglines, or applications like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon that run on the computer desktop and do the same thing: bring lots and lots of current information from your favorite blogs and other websites to you almost in real time.
The problem: most of us subscribe to so many RSS feeds, reading them becomes a time consuming challenge. Wouldn't it be helpful at times if your RSS aggregator could sift through all of your feeds and indicate trends and top discussions from among all of your RSS sources? Tah dah: Feverº!
Feverº looks for hot "discussions" across your many feeds. It actually encourages you to add more feeds, even ones you're less interested in following on a regular basis, but consider trusted sources. You add these feeds to a group called "Sparks." Fever looks through your "Sparks" and your "Kindling" (which are the feeds you read regularly) for the topics or discussions that are "Hot." Sort of an aggregator of aggregation...
These hot topics are ranked in order with the hottest ones on top. You can check out the hot topics for now, today, this week, etc.
Fever will not be for everyone because it is web-based and must be self-hosted on your own server account. This means you must install it yourself on a hosting service. However, that said, I found the installation easy and straight forward. Your hosting service requirements include your typical: Apache, PHP, and MySQL.
Because you are hosting it yourself, Google isn't monitoring and making money off of what you read, and you can read from any browser, your iPhone or iPod Touch, and Mac users even have a desktop application, Chill Pill, that interfaces with Feverº to add additional functionality.
Feverº is a novel approach to RSS feed aggregation and reading and offers many things I haven't mentioned. You might want to check it out! While its current feature set is already rich enough to cause me to purchase it, I look forward to seeing it even mature further. In light of the recent changes to NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, Feverº may well become my new aggregator of choice!
