Fever launched today to much fanfare, and it’s hot. Red hot.

The problem with traditional feed readers is that they treat RSS like an inbox, assuming that you want to go through and read every post, one by one.

This leads to one of two scenarios:

• People subscribe to an infinite number of blogs so they “don’t miss a thing” and become overwhelmed by the RSS backlog, eventually declaring feed reader bankruptcy.
• People — most often the ones that have already fallen victim to scenario one — decide to carefully examine every site they add to their feed reader, only adding the ones they know they’ll read religiously.

RSS today is not what it was four years ago. There are tumblogs and linked lists and reblogs and retweets and everyone and their pet dog is linking to everyone else’s content. RSS has become more of a notification system than a distribution system.

Many have tried to grasp onto this new form of “word-of-mouth” linking, with the most notable example being Tumblr. And while Tumblr has done an excellent job at making it easy for people to republish content to their own audience, I can’t help but feel that they’ve neglected the creation of original content.

I love original content and I love reblogged content and I wish some genius would find a way to stick them into one neat little package with a cherry on top.

Someone did, and that someone is Shaun Inman.

Feed a Fever

Fever treats both original and regurgitated content as first-class citizens, cleverly labeling them as Kindling and Sparks respectively.

Shaun Inman explains:

Fever asks you to make a simple distinction between essential and supplemental feeds. Essential, must-read feeds are Kindling. Supplemental, low signal-to-noise feeds are Sparks. Sparks ignite Kindling raising the temperature of items and links that should not be missed.

Fever then acts as a self-contained recommendation engine of sorts for the content that you’re already subscribed to. It finds which links are popular among your Fever “ecosystem” and pushes them to the top of your “Hot” list. You can check in, skim the latest buzz, and check out — all without sacrificing the Kindling that you actively subscribe to and read religiously.

It really is a marvelous concept that allows you to go wild with feed subscriptions. You can toss all your new feeds into the Sparks group risk-free and reap the benefit of an improved Fever algorithm. As Shawn Blanc points out, contrary to the traditional wisdom of feed readers, the more feeds you throw at it, the better Fever actually functions.

Web App Hotness

As my partner in crime will tell you, I am not a fan of web apps that try to replicate, much less replace native desktop applications. While Fever isn’t perfect, it’s as close to a desktop app as you’re going to get in a browser. Fever has better keyboard shortcuts than most native applications — it’s entire user interface can be navigated from the ‘board.

Even better, if you have one of the newer MacBook Pros with a multitouch trackpad and do a little MultiClutch and Fluid tweaking, you trigger Fever’s “arrowing out” to an article by simply swiping three fingers across your trackpad. Pretty nifty, huh?

The real reason I decided to switch from a native feed reader to a web-based client is its ubiquity. All your RSS feeds can be accessed from any modern web browser and from your iPhone or iPod Touch without dealing with the cumbersome, frustrating, and unreliable process of syncing.

Not to mention that the iPhone web app is downright gorgeous, albeit a bit laggy:

The Blob of Awesomeness

After a day of use, it’s clear that Sparks are the key to Fever’s magic algorithm. Although it turns out that finding link feeds to cram into Fever’s blob of awesomeness is much harder than I previously thought.

When I saw Fever’s “saved posts” feature (which involves tapping the ’s’ key on any item you wish to save for later), I couldn’t help but ponder a better way to not only find content, but to share it.

What if Fever had the ability to not only “save” but “star” a post or link that one thought was particularly interesting. Fever could easily make this custom “starred” list into a public RSS feed that other Fever users could throw into their blobs of awesomeness to create an even bigger blob of awesomeness.

It would be a drop-dead simple recommendation engine that anyone could customize, tweak, or opt into or out of at any moment, while at the same time ensuring that users are not bombarded by information overload — skimming here and there to find the occasional meat among the bones.

Cause after all, the biggest forest fires are the ones that spread.