A new app called Current is rethinking the RSS reader, aiming to offer a reading experience that feels more like dipping into a stream of news, and less like a task to be completed. In doing so, the app could make using RSS feeds to consume news and information a more approachable experience for those who aren’t consuming news for work or consider themselves information junkies.
Current’s developer, Terry Godier, said he noticed that he always felt guilty when returning to his feed reader after a few days away. He attributed his feelings to how most readers were built to resemble email inboxes, with unread counts, and bolded text for new items.
“Email’s unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response. The number isn’t neutral information. It’s a measure of social debt,” Godier wrote in a blog post about how he came to create Current, which is a side project he worked on during his free time.
“But when we applied that same visual language to RSS…we imported the anxiety without the cause,” he said.
Image Credits:Current
For those unfamiliar, RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a format that allows users to access updated information from websites in a structured format. For instance, new headlines and articles from your favorite news site would appear as new, unread entries in the RSS reader (aka news reader or feed reader) of your choice.
The format was hugely popular in the early 2000s until the 2006 arrival of Twitter shifted people to another platform for real-time news and information sharing. Within a few years, people were ditching Google’s popular RSS reader, Google Reader, in favor of Twitter’s 140-character posts. Another few years later, Google Reader shut down for good. (We still miss it.)
But RSS itself never died. In addition to being the underlying tool for podcast distribution, you can still use the format to syndicate from websites through RSS apps like Feedly, NetNewsWire, Inoreader, Reeder, and others.
Current, however, proposes a different RSS experience. Instead of structuring feeds as lists to be processed, or unread counts driven to zero, the app’s main screen is a river.
Screenshot Image Credits:Current on the App Store
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