The Usability of Feeds

Jaffery Veen has posted about the usability of subscribing to feeds [via Dave Winer]. The topic of discussion is how easy Mac made it with Safari and OS X Tiger. I am a Mac user and am writing this from Safari on Tiger, so I know what he is talking about. For me the addition of NetNewsWire is the killer combination (more important than email for me now). I too want other browser/OS/aggregator developers to follow suit.

I do want to add that Apple was not the innovator here, KDE was first. I was using Akregator about a year ago. It was integrated with Konqueror too. It was pretty much the exact same thing that Apple rolled out in Tiger. So I think we should just not that we hope other developers follow KDE’s lead like Apple did.

Update: Scoble is asking if we have any suggestions. Yes. Robert, buy a Mac, buy NetNewsWire, consider that the bare minimum. You should also install KDE on your tablet and check out the Konqueror/Akregator integration too. For extra points check out the NewsTicker panel applet for KDE as well. That is the only thing I miss about when I am on my PowerBook.

I don’t know how Akregator handles enclosures (podcasts). NetNewsWire can be configured to download them to iTunes and set the id3 tags (mine set the genre to podcast).