Comments on: One RSS Reader to Rule Them All

Question: One RSS Reader to Rule Them All

jacquilynne — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:28:50 -0800

What web-based RSS reader can I use for multiple people to access the same account at the same time?

I have a group of about a dozen people who need to read a large number of posts from a variety of sources. But they don't all need to read each item--it's enough that any person in the group read has read each item.

At the moment, we have a lot of duplication of effort, because we all have the same sources, but no way to tell which ones other people in the group have already read.

We can easily have the sources set up as RSS feeds (though they aren't currently), and my thought is to get the group a single web-based RSS reader account that we could all log into as needed. Anything that showed up in the RSS readers as new is something that no one in the group has checked. Anything that shows up as read is something someone else has checked -- you can read it if you want, but you don't have to. The minor duplication that would happen between refreshes if two people were actively reading the feeds at the same time would likely not be an issue.

The obvious thought is Google Reader--except that it's what I use for my normal, every day feed reading (you know, for AskMe and such) and I don't want to have to log out and log back in as the group account or use a different browser to separate my group feed from the personal stuff.

Are there other web based RSS readers that are as easy to work with as Google? Any in particular that you suggest for something like this? I'm admittedly relatively new to the whole RSS thing, having just bothered to start using a reader in the last couple of months, so I'm not sure what other options there are.

I looked at the info on Bloglines, for example, but it says it only polls for updates hourly, which is probably not often enough -- while Google seems to poll for updates whenever you hit 'refresh' which would be much better.

Note: For this question, 'That's not what you want to do at all, this is what you really want to do...' answers are specifically welcome. If you've got a better idea on how a group can share read/unread marking on RSS feeds, I'm open to hearing it.

By: rhizome

rhizome — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:31:38 -0800

netvibes

By: Laura in Canada

Laura in Canada — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:36:06 -0800

Seconding Netvibes... my boyfriend & I use the same account & I know what he's read & vice versa.

By: mnology

mnology — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:42:46 -0800

I use reFeed all by my lonesome so don't really twiddle with the user stuff. Although in 'single user mode' if you just use regular htaccess authentication all interested parties would use the same accounting of read/unread items.

By: scottreynen

scottreynen — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:42:49 -0800

You could use something like rss2email or RssFwd to send the RSS feeds to a shared IMAP account, which would mark each email as read whenever anyone reads it.

By: unixrat

unixrat — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:06:14 -0800

Netvibes

By: hwestiii

hwestiii — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:41:14 -0800

One more for netvibes.

By: so_necessary

so_necessary — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:20:04 -0800

And one more extraneous vote for the awesomeness that is Netvibes.

By: desjardins

desjardins — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:38:39 -0800

All you'd have to do in Google reader is assign the relevant feeds a tag, and share that tag. Point your associates to the account's shared feeds, and presto, no one has to log in, including you.

The drawback, of course, is that nothing gets marked as "read."

By: jacquilynne

jacquilynne — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:06:12 -0800

Yeah, nothing getting marked as read doesn't help me at all. That's pretty much the point of the exercise--right now we have static web pages with queues of this stuff, but no way to tell what anyone else on the team has read. Changing the DB to create "read by an admin" flag and then building an interface to show us that is more work than it's worth, but RSS feeds seem relatively simple and if we used them in place of the static queues, they could give us the read marking.

By: specialk420

specialk420 — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:29:47 -0800

jeez yeah - nevibes ecosystem. dang!