I don't use RSS readers... until now

After hearing news of Apple adding feed reading to Safari, I was a bit skeptical. As much as I like reading weblogs, I hate using RSS readers. Readers have a lot of basic problems: putting a count on every feed and item like weblogs are suddenly my work inbox that I have to keep down to zero, the counts are recorded by the program, so jumping from one computer to another means you lose count of your feeds, and viewing comments or the rest of a message requires jumping to a browser anyway. Personally I use an update montior, and track the newly updated sites with a sidebar.

But after seeing this quicktime demo of the Safari reader, it just might be the first one I ever use. Gone are the counts on everything telling me how many more posts I must read. In its place is something more akin to Kinja or LiveJournal: you get a universal home page of all the recent items you are interested in. The "personal newspaper" metaphor is one that has been thrown around for years, but few of the RSS readers offer it.

While this new feature isn't perfect (it still ties me to Safari running on a single computer), the display of all feeds on a single page and lack of incessant counting will probably be enough to make me switch over.