It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago I was talking about Rethinking my Information flow and I believe I said something along the lines that I use multiple tools to kind of piece together what I want.

I feel like there is not a 100% solution I have seen and maybe that is where my expectations are too high or maybe what I am looking for is not what everyone else needs.

Insert Readwise Reader that just became a public beta this week. I jumped on board and actually became a paying member as I wanted to really give this a go. I think the things that really piqued my interest is that it really could be a one-stop shop for reading, and saving information. Having the integration built right into the RSS feed so that you can quickly save things for later that end up in an Inbox is kind of what I have tried to do with my various tools. Also, if I just happen to be browsing around on the web I can use their browser extensions (or iOS Apps) to save it into my queue. Then I have one place to find all of this stuff instead of finding an interesting link and putting it in a Read later service that I don’t access enough. Or on the flip side, I access the read it later app too often because it gets out of control and I fall behind on triaging my RSS feed and eventually just mark them all as read to try to start over.

As you can see I am really all for this tool as it really does put pieces of my current process all in one place.

Now onto some of my hopes and gripes. Granted it is still in Beta and I am sure they will constantly tweak things to make everything better overall. However, here is a couple:

  • RSS Reader Views/Categories - The UI for the current RSS reader as it is a little clunky in my opinion. I like to bucket my RSS feeds into various things depending on what I want to catch up on (e.g., Friends' Blogs, News, YouTube Videos, Runners 😉). It isn’t that this is not possible in Readwise Reader as you can do like I did and move things to Views. Though it is very clunky to setup as I have to touch all of my feeds again to assign them. I am sure this might be something that will change in the future but really the heavy lift will be from the initial import as I had a lot of feeds. So I guess if you are starting from scratch this would be easier. However, if Views are the way to go I would like a view that shows anything unassigned to a view as I used to use a Category like that in FreshRSS for Feeds I was kind of giving a trial before I sorted them out.
  • JSON Feeds - I am really hoping they will support this because my current FreshRSS Reader doesn’t allow for this and since I get some of my reading from Micro.blog I would like to be able to subscribe to the Discovery feed. Now that this option has been brought to my attention, I want to be able to have it in my reader of choice. Thanks for the heads up on this one Jason!
  • Dynamic OPML Feeds - This is probably not a deal breaker for me as I just started using this from Feedland. However, now that I have started to use it as a source of information I kind of like how it would pull in articles or blogs that were most read by other users in the Feedland world to my feed from time to time.
  • Youtube - Seems like it isn’t showing the video or a quick link to access the video but only the closed caption that YouTube generates for the video if available. This has now been corrected I think as of the last update and now you can actually watch videos in the iOS App or on the web without leaving the interface.
  • Original Source - Sometimes I want to get the original link to share that out and I struggle to find how I can either open the original link in the webpage to get this or just find where a link is buried. I do think this will be fixed as it isn’t consistent how iOS does this and has good functionality vs reading on the Web to this day I have not really found how to open/share the original link. The best I have found is that I can share a Public copy of the document which would then let people see my notes / highlights which isn’t a huge problem just not what I was looking for. Big correction, not sure if I missed this the other day or if it was an added feature but I guess there is an Original Link in the dropdown.

As you can tell they are constantly making changes and I am really hopeful that this will be the one place for me and I can then shutter some of the tools I currently have. Granted there is a cost associated with this after the Free Beta period and it is looking to come in at $8 per month. However, upon closer inspection of their Pricing page, it looks like they might raise the price next year due to the extra value they are placing on the new Reader portion of Readwise.