Fever is a unique RSS reader that tries to alleviate the psychological pressure of unread counts and the grind of paging through essentially-duplicate stories from multiple feeds by performing some sort of analysis on the items in your feeds and bubbling the ‘hot’ content to the top. I’ve been using it for a week or so now.

There is a definite barrier to entry involved in the fact that Fever is a web application that you need to host yourself. The actual installation is smooth and painless, and all the compatibility tests can be run prior to purchase, so you can be assured that the application will function before you part with your $30. But you are completely out of luck if you don’t have your own web host, which is probably the case for a lot of potential users. It’s kind of unfortunate because Fever is a really cool idea by a really cool developer, and well worth supporting.

The general idea behind Fever is to divide your RSS feeds into two categories: important feeds (“kindling”) and lesser-value feeds (“sparks”). Articles in spark feeds are used to determine which articles from kindling feeds are really important, and those articles are displayed in Fever’s “Hot” group. The more an article is linked to or discussed by entries in spark feeds, the more important Fever will consider that article. Importance is represented to the user as a temperature relative to optimal human body temperature.

I’ve never really had too much of a problem with RSS management, but this is mainly because I’ve always been extremely selective about which feeds I subscribe too. I stayed away from major news feeds like those of 1UP and Shacknews because they generate a huge volume of articles and I cared about very few of them. Mainly, I subscribed to the blogs or sites of friends or people I respected. Before using Fever I had about 25 RSS feeds, most of them low-traffic. Fever’s clever tricks don’t work that well with so paltry a subscription count, however, so I’ve added subscriptions to the aforementioned sites (and others).

The impression that I’ve developed over the past week is mostly positive — I’ve run into some user interface weirdness (I can’t drag feeds from the sparks group to the kindling group, but I can drag them the other way, for example), but nothing serious. Overall the UI is quite pleasing, especially compared to Google Reader. The most jarring UI issue? Sometimes Fever chooses to display a headline that’s a little odd, such as (“Ars Technica reports”), because it uses link text as headers.

Honestly, though, this probably has more to do with the site serving up the feed than Fever itself. I suspect I could reduce the number of occurrences of issues like that if I tended my kindling/sparks with more care, as well. But that brings me to my only real serious gripe with Fever, which is that figuring out where to put a feed is sometimes a bit of a mystery. Since I’m not sure precisely how the dynamic between kindling and sparks works, I am currently tending to leave everything as kindling and “demoting” things after a while, one at a time. Initially, I’d tried exactly the opposite, but I found I got almost no useful results (this could also be because the corpus of data available to Fever is still quite small, since I still don’t have that many feeds).

Additionally, because of the way Fever works (and how long it takes to refresh the feed heuristics), it’s probably not that suitable for people who must know everything that happens as it happens. I’ve definitely had more success treating it as an occasional thing — something I log in to at lunch, or after work, rather than something I keep open in a browser tab all the time.

Fever functions as a “normal” RSS reader as well, although I don’t have much to say about it’s performance in that domain since I wasn’t a heavy RSS consumer beforehand. I set up a group for the handful of feeds I want to read every post from, set that specific group to show unread counts, and between that and Fever’s Hot group, everything’s been great.