I had a brief play with Alertbear this morning - a new RSS reader which claims to adopt the “river of news” approach to reading your news. I’m not keen; this might be useful if you only read one or two feeds but for anyone with a large number of regularly updated feeds, this isn’t going to be the best solution. The Alertbear “river of news” (a more attractive version of “toast”: little popup panels above your task bar) looks nice, and works quite well. The scrollwheel can be used to flick up and down through new feeds, and there’s a little slider that allows you to quickly traverse your list of feeds. It all feels a little bit clunky though. The client interface that’s used to actually read your news really lets this down. It looks like an unfinished, early version of one of the more conventional RSS applications (like FeedDemon, RSS Bandit, SharpReader etc). At least the Alertbear team have tried something a little different though.
My personal favourite RSS client is still FeedDemon - I’ve been using it for a while now (a couple of years, I think, although that seems like an incredibly long time now I think about it) and the latest version, 2.0, adds a raft of new features which improve usability. If you’ve never tried an RSS client, or aren’t familiar with RSS, I’d suggest you give one of the above a try. Alertbear might be a good starting point, and you can always export your feeds to another client if you want to try a new one.