I wrote back in December about how I liked the Y! Mail feed reader.  Funny thing about that…. I never use it.  Even though I bothered to write a review, I don’t think I’ve used that feature more than 3 times.  After writing that, I moved to using Outlook 2007 for RSS.  I would read online either via Outlook or via Exchange webmail.  On my mobile I would sync the feeds down as email and read on the phone.

It worked well, but with this setup, I would rarely read.  I would almost never read anything from my feeds throughout the day.  Outlook would always pull my attention into the inbox full of work to-do’s so I wouldn’t even notice that there were new feeds.  I only read feeds on my phone when I had a lot of downtime (e.g. stuck in a 10 hour drive home from Tahoe) since I wasn’t reminded and I needed to actively think about checking news.  It didn’t get any better over time either as my feeds continued to pile up adding more and more guilt into the mix.  About every other week I would find time, sitdown, and mow through 20-50 posts in a hour.  Not a good way to consume the content.

So, I’ve given up on the Outlook approach and gone back to my old standby….. the Good News plugin for Trillian.  The plugin has been updated since I dumped it 4 months back so I can group common feed topics together, so that’s nice.  After just one day with this setup I am already feeling more connected to my feeds.  I get little alerts from Trillian to quickly assess if the post is interesting.  If so, I take a few minutes and read it.

On the recommendation of Todd I have installed NewsBreak on my Pocket PC.  So far, it seems to do the trick.  It’s simple, it downloads the posts to read when offline and it displays alerts for new posts.  Those are (almost) all of the features I want.  What’s missing?  Read status sync between apps… who’s going to solve this for me?!!!