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

POCKET

  • 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

FLIPBOARD

  • 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.