Fever: Black, White and Read Hot All Over
Mint has a new baby sister! Earlier this morning I released Fever, a cure for the common feed reader. Born of (almost) a decade of accumulating and failing to keep up with hundreds of feeds, Fever is a self-hosted recommendation engine for content you’re already subscribed to built atop a full-featured feed reader.
Peeriodicals
About a year and a half ago, shortly after releasing Mint 2, I had a stats-inspired epiphany: What if, instead of mentally processing hundreds of headlines your feed reader did that heavy—we’re talking pre-coffee—lifting and just told you what everyone was collectively talking about? And what if it weighted those “hot” topics and aggregated the ensuing discussions in your feeds together?
You could check in once a day—once a week even—and not miss a beat. You could follow new feeds with abandon, the more you fed it, the more effective it would get. Like a personalized, passive Digg catering to your unique interests.
That’s Fever in a nutshell. For more details check out feedafever.com and don’t miss the screencast (those 5 minutes consumed 48 excruciating hours of my life).
The Village
It’s true what they say, it takes a village to raise a child and Fever wouldn’t exist in its current form without the timely input of a handful of generous and insightful beta testers. We built this city.
026 Comments
You are an unqualified genius.
At last! I’m excitedly running the compatibility suite now… Congrats on the release, m’boy!
Looks absolutely amazing, and the 5 minute screencast was very professional, well worth the 48 excruciating hours of your life. Congrats man very inspiring work.
Congrats on all your hard work Shaun, you truly have created another fantastic product. Well done mate.
Looks awesome. Not sure a hosted potion is what I would be after, but I was definitely excited to see it! Well done.
Wow. {Jaw drops.}
Congrats Shaun. The product and interface are dead-on. Fever is the only reason I haven’t given up on RSS.
Thanks all. I’m experiencing some unanticipated server hiccups, if you run into a problem please use the contact form on the Fever site as I probably won’t be monitoring these comments too closely for the first day or so.
Installed, purchased, and already enjoying. Well done.
bought. pure genius. thank you!
Looks awesome, but I really wish I didn’t have to host it myself
Definitely true. Simply put: you rock.
I hope the first day sales will repay all your hard work you had in 18 months. (And count my purchase in those.)
Soooooo hot!
It’s a fantastic idea, and you pulled it off so well, Shaun.
Fantastic. Absolutely wonderful design, seamless installation process, and my first impressions are brilliant. Congratulations!
Really excellent stuff. Installed and imported my Bloglines feeds in no time. Bloglines is now a chore to use.
My only regret is that last week I pruned over 150 feeds from Bloglines because it was taking up too much of my time. Those feeds would have been useful sparks.
Congrats Shaun! I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.
A fabulous app, and an immediate purchase. Well done.
I’m interested, but having jumped feed readers several times a couple years back and settling on Google Reader, I feel kind of locked to a few features I really like.
Does fever have the extensibility that Mint has? I’d love to add a “Share on Google Reader” option or even the ability to find the shared items feeds from my contacts over there.
Congrats on the release! I can’t wait to get my copy!
This really looks great, Shaun. Congrats.
Just got the email on it earlier this morning, looks like a very very interesting product. Fortunately for me my feed list is on the short side so I haven’t caught the fever just yet. Down the line, however, I will know where to look.
Great idea Shaun, but is possible to test it online like Mint ?
A paid hosting service would be a very nice addition someday, huh?
What an awesome way to separate signal from noise.
I really wish I could try it before buying though, and that were an option that did not involve self-hosting. I would (assuming it’s as good as it looks) happily pay a subscription fee.
Definitely going to give this a whirl as soon as I built up more feeds in my archives.
Not only was the feed reader switch over painless, but it was actually a lot of fun. What a nice end of exams present for myself :P.