Fever is a $30 RSS and Atom feed reading application created by Shaun Inman, the same developer who created Mint, the $30 website analytics application. Shaun has a video demo of Fever that you can watch on the website dedicated to the application, but unfortunately, there is no try-before-you-buy option with the software, which only runs after you have purchased a license and authenticated the installation on your server. 

Besides the no-money-back $30 up front with no chance to try the application, the other big obstacle that will prevent many from giving this feed reader a try is that to run the application, you have to host it on a webserver somewhere that is accessible by a domain name that you own. Once it is hosted on your server, you can either update your feeds manually whenever you visit Fever in your browser or set up a regular cron job on your server to update the feeds. If you don't know what a cron job is, then this application is probably not for you.

In short, Fever is for people who are very serious about their feed reading. As such a person (I'm currently subscribed to 537 RSS feeds that I manage to skim in their entirety every other day), I thought I'd take the plunge, plop down my hard-earned $30, and give the application a thorough kicking of the tires.

After two weeks using Fever as my sole feed reader, I definitely like it, but I also am sure it's not for everyone.

Self-hosted feed reader vs. hosted readers

If I were writing this review before October 7th, 2005 when Google launched Google Reader, then Fever would be a definitive force to be reckoned with in the world of RSS reading. However, it's 2009 and Google Reader has been out of Google's seemingly eternal beta labeling for two years now, and it is freely available for anyone who wants to sign up and start using it. Google hosts everything, so there's no need to set up a MySQL database for it, FTP the files to your PHP-capable server, and set up a cron job to make it work. Again, if you didn't understand any of that last sentence, then Fever isn't for you and you should just go check out Google Reader.

If, however, you're still with me and you've thought while reading this review "Wait a minute: I could read my feeds out of the view of the all-seeing eyes of Google!" then Fever might be a real contender for your attention and money. You can upload and install Fever in an unactivated (and largely useless) state before purchasing your license to test to make sure that your server is fully compatible with the application. Once your server successfully passes the compatibility test, you pay for the application, and then receive an activation code that lets the app run in a sub-folder of your site. This means that just like Google Reader, you can now access your feed reader whose data is running on your server and in your MySQL database via any modern web browser. 

Also, Shaun has designed a nice iPhone web app for Fever (see Fever iPhone interface section below) so you can read your feeds easily on your iPhone (I've tested on both a first generation iPhone running iPhone OS 2.0 and a new 3GS running iPhone OS 3.0 and it works fine on both). He even offers a nice big Fever icon for download, should you want to run the software in a dedicated single-site browser, like Fluid.app or a custom Google Chrome app.

Since the application is hosted on a server, it doesn't suffer the slow down, memory leaks, and bloat that locally installed feed readers running on your local computer can sometimes experience when running hot updating a large number of feeds. In fact, even with my 537 feeds, I've not experienced any problems with lag or problems loading feeds or updating feeds. Right after installation I uploaded my OPML file that I'd exported from my Google Reader account, and Fever quickly started crawling for new feed items and showing me results. You can set Fever to update your feeds every 15 minutes while you have it open in your browser or to only update manually when you choose to update your feeds. As previously mentioned, you can also set up a cron job to have your server automatically check for new feed items at regular intervals. If you're planning on using Fever from your iPhone, then you'll definitely need to do set up a cron job, as there is no way to reload the feeds via the mobile app, as it is a desktop-browser initiated activity.

Fever Hot

Figure 1: Running Fever as a standalone application via Fluid.app on OS X displaying Hot view

The cool feature about Fever that separates it from your average everyday feed reader, and which gives it its name, is that it has a Hot section that automatically groups interlinking feed items together in a shared view and then ranks them based on which items are receiving the most discussion. You can choose to look at snapshots of hotness starting now, yesterday, two days ago, and then daily up to a week ago and then weekly up to five weeks ago, and you can tell Fever to look at a snapshot of hotness that stretches over the past day, two days, three days, etcetera, up to a week, and then number of weeks up to a month. This is a very useful feature if you've been away from your feed reader for a few days and you want to see a quick summary of the big stories you might have missed or if you want to find out what were the hottest stories of the past week or month. 

As you can see in Figure 1 above, the top story for the past 24 hours amongst all my feeds is yesterday's release of Firefox 3.5 and then the second, third, and forth item listed all had to do with The Pirate Bay being sold to Global Gaming Factory X. The longer a sampling of time you choose for the Hot section gives Fever more data to work with and tends to result in slightly better grouped feeds. 

However, you can also blacklist certain links, either root URL or specific full link, from being used to group items. For example, I had to blacklist the root URL http://www.engadget.com because every Engadget story links to other Engadget stories and breaks the grouping. Since I only blacklisted the root URL, this still allows other feed items from other publications that link to a specific Engadget story to group around that single story. It just prevents six different stories linking to six different URLs that share the root URL of http://www.engadget.com from linking together.

Kindling and Sparks

Fever provides another way that you can fine tune the Hot section even more: by defining feeds as being either Kindling or Sparks and by adding more Sparks to the system. Kindling are all your main feeds that you consider your high priority feeds. Sparks are secondary feeds of less importance, but which may be instrumental in helping to propel your Kindling items to hotness. 

For example, if you have a friend who is particularly knowledgeable about a topic and that friend regularly uses Twitter to mention cool links that she has found online, you could add the feed to her Twitter account as a Spark feed to Fever to help group items in that topic area together. Fever also has a sort of auto-pilot mode where you can choose for it to automatically add Spark feeds based on frequent links within your Kindling feeds, so even if you're lazy like me and haven't bothered to spend tons of time setting up separate Kindling and Spark feeds, Fever will learn over time.

Feed reading

Figure 2: Kindling view of reading feeds in Fever

The feed reading portion of Fever, although well-designed, takes some getting used to if you're coming from a reader, as I was, like Google Reader. When you click on Kindling, the second column is populated with a list of all your subscriptions with number of unread items next to each as in Figure 2 above. You can simply choose to view All unread to see all unread items from all your feeds in reverse chronological order. By default, Fever presents all the stories collapsed, and clicking on the actual title of the post opens the item in a new window or tab in your browser, so at first I was confused by this behavior and thought that I couldn't actually read my feeds in Fever and that I was limited to only previews of my feeds. 

However, clicking in any part of the story besides the actual title expands the story fully. After taking the time to look at the preferences and keyboard shortcuts, I also discovered a setting to display all feed items expanded by default and to toggle to the next feed item by hitting the space bar and the previous item by hitting SHIFT + Space. Each feed item also has a + sign link next to the title of the story that shows up whenever you mouse over the story and via which you can save the story to your Saved folder. If you mistakenly save something this sign turns into a - sign link via which you can remove the item from the Saved folder. 

Fever does a good job of showing you more items as you reach the bottom and you can always refresh all your feeds for new items manually whenever you like, so it performs well as a regular feed reader and the only ability really missing that Google Reader has is the ability to share items of interest out to a Shared Items feed that your friends can subscribe to and that you can add to your blog via a widget. 

Fever iPhone interface

  

Figures 3, 4, & 5: iPhone Fever interface launch screen, home screen, and Hot screen

  

Figures 6, 7, & 8: iPhone Kindling view, All unread view, and single item view

If you have an iPhone, then Fever doubles as an on-the-go iPhone web app for reading your feeds, and it shines nicely in this capacity. The Fever web app is installed by navigating to your Fever install via Mobile Safari and then adding the site as a bookmark to your Home screen. Once that's done, the application launches and runs as if it is an entirely separate application from Mobile Safari. Each of the three columns that you have in desktop view become different views that slide in nicely from the right when you click on the corresponding item in the current pane with two key differences. 

First, when you view an individual feed item it doesn't simply expand in the preview view, but instead opens in its own item window pane with a Next item and previous item option at the bottom of the screen. Then, oddly, unlike in the desktop client, when you click on the title of a post in Fever on the iPhone the link is not loaded in Mobile Safari, but instead opens in another loading-from-the-right-side pane webview of the story with a navigational bar at the top. Clicking on the icon in the upper right hand corner of this bar takes you to Mobile Safari and clicking on the icon on the left takes you back to the feed item. I say this is odd, because as the feed item itself is a preview of the story, there's no reason, really, not to go directly to Mobile Safari in this scenario, and skipping the intermediate extra preview step.

Verdict

Fever is a solidly performing feed reader that has a nicely designed interface and polished look that may be a good fit for you if you're looking to move away from a free option like Google Reader that is hosted with someone else. If you find yourself often not checking up on your feeds and wanting a good summary of the hot items you missed, then Fever's Hot view with the ranking is a definite killer feature that other feed readers lack. I myself have fully migrated to Fever and it is now my default feed reader. However, $30 is a bit more money than the free cost of most feed readers out there, and because of that, this application is only a great feed reader and value for someone who has a website of their own where they can install the application and an iPhone for reading the feeds while on the go to take full advantage of the potential of this application.

Obsessable rating: 7 out of 10