News and Newsreaders
I’ve been finding my niche news consumption to be really challenged recently – requiring a lot of manual management of links and feeds and it’s becoming unwieldy. So I set out to evaluate and clean up my systems.
The Brief
I would like to:
- Set up feeds of the various things I’m personally interested in for reading further about. [personal curation with RSS]
- Connect those to apps on my various devices [consumption app]
- Sync those apps content in an offline manner [automatic sync in coverage / wifi]
- Read the content, when I have time to read that content, usually when underground or on a flight. [off-line consumption]
These aggregated sources would be consumed alongside the paid media I find useful – I would like to be able to consume in the same location, if the user experience is good.
Apps Reviewed
Their sign-in process is atrocious. Instead of signing into Pocket, you’re signing into someting called Mozilla Auth hosted at firefox.com. A super confusing brand experience.
Then once you’ve reset your password at getpocket/firefox/mozilla, you find the login button doesn’t work on iPhone. End of review.
FAIL
Similarly to Pocket, the Flipboard signin is a bit awful. At least I can make it work on the web. On mobile, it gives me an error with a nonspecific error message “Please try again later” – but with no clear indication of what’s wrong.
Managed to get access on my old device, without needing to reset my account. Also, logged in on the web fine.
The consumption experience is really good, if you have a magazine of interests preprepared.
Unfortunately, I think they’ve lost their way. You can follow #topics (from their prepared feeds) or “people” from a list of other users who have curated magazines, or “accounts” – which is limited to Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfied or Youtube.
And you can curate a magazine by adding link-by-link. But nothing will help you do this automatically – they’re locked in a manual curation mindset.
For example, I can’t see a real-time updated magazine that combines UK train company procurement news with Japanese and Canadian train manufacturer news, unless there is someone out there who is actively making it manually – which, for this niche, is extremely unlikely.
So, despite its superior consumption experience, I’ll have to skip Flipboard.
Note: If they added back TwitterX, Facebook, and RSS/Atom, I probably would reconsider this.
FAIL
Instapaper
Successfully logged in to my old account! (The first out of the three.)
[on iphone] The screen isn’t used densely enough – a fair amount of margin is wasted with blankspace. But good customisation on the linespacing and font size. A good single-article experience, I think.
Extra features: I really like the speed read feature and the voice-read feature.
Downside: No magazine curation, and a really generic consumption experience. I think this will probably be useful for long and generic document reading, rather than online articles.
POSSIBLE
Feedly
- Logged in, successfully
- Looks as though they have good curation (if limited to three “boards” per user at the free tier)
- The consumption in-app is pretty vanilla (cards, lists, text-only view)
- The consumption on-web is really good UX, but keeps being interrupted by up-sell to pro/enterprise plans – a really atrocious user experience for just a vanilla user. I probably won’t go to this for that reason.
If I had my preference I would have
- Consumption via Flipboard, with each category of interest as a “magazine” – but with automatic feed
- Curation via Feedly, with each category of interest presenting an RSS feed for use elsewhere
- A link between the two that makes it easy to manage new categories of interests, by setting up a new feed and a new magazine.
FAIL
Inoreader
This seems to be a winner for feed curation
- It allows you to subscribe to RSS and established channels
- It will combine into folders, and allow you to read from the folder
- You can mark read / archive etc
Downsides:
- The text filtering / curation could use work, as the reading experience is still a little “simple curl-to-text”
- A number of the app-suggested feeds are broken / out of date / non-functional – the service could use some monitoring and curation of broken links.
Future evaluation: Youtube and vido sync, as a separate item.
WINNER
What’s next?
- Can I deal with video sync as easily?
- Will inoreader stay around? Will it improve? Will it stay useful?
- Can I curate into the feeds effectively?
Watch this space!
Summary: The dominant apps in this space have moved a long way away from where they started, which is to sort out the gap left by Feedburner and Google Reader. Of course this is a complicated space – still being fought by legacy publishers and new disaggregated consumption. But as a consumer, I don’t really care. I want a good and easy to manage content consumption mechanic – none of which I really get with current providers. Still some work to do.