If you have ever used Mint for your site statistics, you have a pretty good idea of the high quality software coming from Shaun Inman.  However, Shaun has outdone himself this time with a completely different take on RSS feeds and news management.

Shaun’s motivation for developing Fever:

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?

Fever is very different from any other RSS readers out there for several reasons.  The most interesting (and yet useful) feature of Fever is where the application lives.  To throw a buzz word around, Fever lives in the “Cloud”.  There is a relatively painless install that gets a copy of Fever on your web server.  And because Fever lives in the cloud, it can always be up to date and stay in sync no matter what device you view it on.  I could end my review there, but I’ll continue.

Installation

Installation couldn’t be simpler (unless Shaun could somehow setup a database on your server for you, which he can’t).  You register for an account on http://feedafever.com/, download a couple files and then throw them up on your server.  Then, let Fever connect to your MySQL database and make sure all is good to go before directing you through paypal and installing itself on your server.  Then you’re ready to import feeds in OPML format from your current news reader.  Seamless install for a web app.  30 USD gets you 1.x upgrades, which happen automatically I might add.  Point to take home, Shaun has set a new standard here.  I was impressed by the installation process alone.

Completely New Way of Looking at your News

I have tons and tons of RSS feeds.  And frankly, I don’t get that much out of them anymore because there is just so much to look at and I don’t have enough time in my day.  Shaun’s innovation hit home here.  First, your feeds are essentially organized into two classes, kindling and sparks.  Kindling are the feeds that you are hot about and don’t want to miss any action.  You can easily get unread counts and organize by group if you wish.  Sparks are feeds that essentially throw in duplicate data.

For my Mac news, I subscribe to several sites, which pretty much post the same thing over and over.  Before, this was a huge pain, but with Fever, it’s actually a plus.  If there are 5 sites that have posted almost the same thing, then obviously it’s important.  So it’s “hot”, maybe around 101F.  I’ll see a grouping of those 5 related articles under one heading, and I can view whatever ones I wish for further reading.  Taking that concept, I want to place feeds that “add fire” to my Kindling in Sparks, reinforcing what I really want to see.  So when I look at the “Hot” area, I see related articles grouped by temperature.  The more buzz on the internet over whatever, the hotter it will be and it will be higher on my list.  Truly remarkable thinking.

iPhone

Shaun took the time to make a truly stellar iPhone interface for the Fever app as well.  For me, this was just icing on the cake.  I have tried so many RSS readers on my iPhone and was disappointed time after time.  I mainly wanted something that would keep my read items in sync between my Mac and iPhone.  Since Fever is a hosted application online in the “cloud”, it can just keep chugging away checking for updates and when I launch my bookmarked Fever on my iPhone, I get a nice interface and get the syncing for free.

Extras

Shaun provides a nice bookmarklet that sets in your browser’s bookmarks bar so when visiting a page you want to subscribe to in Fever, just click the bookmarklet and choose a group to add it to (or to your sparks) and off you go.  Clean and simple.

There is also a beautiful icon to go with Fluid.app (now free), an application that basically creates a super simple Safari window with it’s own menu bar and icon that sits in your dock.  Nice thing about this is you get the gorgeous icon in your dock, including amazingly enough, a dock unread count.  Crazy.

And to make sure that Fever is more up to date than you are, Shaun even provides you with a short snippet to add to your server’s cron manager, so you can have your feeds update every 15 minutes with ease.  Fever will keep checking even if you’re not around and when you load the page, you’re all ready to go.  That is the last piece of the puzzle for me, I love it.

For More…

I highly encourage you to check out http://feedafever.com/ for more information.  There is a lot of great information along with a quick demo video to get you running.  This was an exceptional 30 bucks spent on my part and I hope that the web gets wind of this soon.  Shaun has a great product on his hands.