For the last few days I’ve been playing with the public beta of NetNewsWire 2, the successor to the first popular newsfeed reader for the Mac and new competitor to Shrook 2, the current favorite in the fieldA Newsfeed reader lets you collect, manage and display newsfeeds, which are stripped-down versions of the most recent stories published by websites such as newspapers, wire services and blogs. A site’s newsfeeds are updated whenever the site is updated; they come in standardized formats (such as RSS), and are fetched regularly by the newsfeed reader, making it possible to keep tabs on hundreds of websites automatically, instead of having to visit these sites individually to see what’s new..

I have taken an instant liking to NNW2. While I was impressed by the features of Shrook 2 when that application came out, I found it to have too many quirks for me to use it as the predominant way of being apprised of what’s new on my favorite sites. Instead, I returned to hunting and pecking at websites with my conventional browser, these days Camino.

NNW2 has quirks too, and it is still beta, but the frustrations I have with this application are of a different kind. NNW2 is so good that I can now see how I will surf the web in a year or two; it’s just that it’s not quite there yet.

How will I surf the web in a year or two? The application I will use will be a browser, with tabs, history, bookmarks, pop-up blocking and what-have-you, but also with souped-up feed management and display tools much like what NNW2 and Shrook 2 offer today.

Both these newsfeed readers now let you toggle between the stripped down version of a story and the much prettier browser version, rendered inside the application. But whereas Shrook 2 does this as a feature, it is much more central to NNW2, which has a back button, an address bar, tabs even! It feels so natural to begin using NNW2 as a starting point for one’s net adventures that it comes as a shock when you instinctively look for but can’t find a google search bar on the top right, or a browse history, or a home button, or lack the ability to access your non-feed shortcuts.

But I now know what I want. And if you read NNW2’s feature request/bug report page, you can see that other beta users are also screaming for a full-fledged in-line browser. The future lies not with newsfeed readers that also render websites but with browsers that also manage and display newsfeedsApple’s next iteration of Safari, shown in the preview of OS X 10.4, lets you collect and display newsfeeds, though it is far from clear how impressive the newsfeed management system is..

What’s more, my future browser will have a system for organizing my feeds that is a hybrid of how Shrook 2 and NNW2 do it today. Simply put, Shrook 2 uses the iTunes library/playlist metaphor, NNW2 uses the email folder metaphor. Both have drawbacks — Like iTunes, Shrook 2’s system is not hierarchical; like Mail or Microsoft Entourage, NNW2’s system does not allow aliases of the same item in different foldersSure, in NNW2 you can subscribe to the same feed as many times as you want and put these shortcuts in different folders, but that is not efficient on many levels..

I want hierarchical folders like NNW2 has. If I highlight my top-level folder called “Sweden”, I get to see all new stories contained by all the feeds in all the subfolders (NNW2 calls these folders “groups.”) If I expand that folder and highlight a subfolder, say, “Politics/media,” I get to see new stories from just the feeds therein. In Shrook 2, on the other hand, you can’t expand folder/playlists in the left-most column — a whole extra column is required to see what’s in them, leading to a four-column layout that I find unwieldy. And, unlike with folders, playlists (Shrook calls them “channels”) can’t contain subplaylists. I have no idea why not, actually.

But I also want to be able to scatter multiple instances of a newsfeed across folder/channels, like Shrook 2 allows. For example, I’d like www.kimthew.com to show up both in my “Friends” folder/channel and “New York” folder/channel. However, should I decide I want to banish my friend forever, it should take but a single swipe from a master library. NNW2 doesn’t let me do this.

And then there are features I want that neither application has yet: For example: hierarchical smart foldersSmart folders are folders that are dynamically populated by news items that meet specific criteria, such as, say, those containing the text fragments “swed” or “svensk” or “sverige”.. Current implementations of these smart folders are a bit crude: You have to choose between matching any criteria or all criteria. You can’t currently make a smart folder that displays items containing either the text “SvD” or “DN” or “Expressen” or “Aftonbladet” but which must also contain the text “Stefan Geens”, for example. In other words, you can’t mix and match the logical OR and AND operators. One solution would be to allow hierarchical smart folders — A top level smart folder would look for the mention of Swedish daily newspapers, a sublevel smart folder would look for my name among those results.

Many of the features in NNW2 were first introduced by Shrook 2. But a couple of them are unique to NNW2, to my knowledge:

NNW2 can compare the current newsfeed’s contents to the previous one. The results can be highly amusing:

NNW2 let’s you save a search in Feedster, Daypop or Blogdigger — they’re like Googles for newsfeeds — as a virtual newsfeed. The most recent news items that include your search term are in it. If you want to know if anyone at all is blogging “Belgium”, even if you don’t subscribe to their newsfeed or have never heard of them, this is the way to do it.

Other clever ideas include connecting scripts to a virtual newsfeed, so you can go scrape websites that have no newsfeeds themselves; a customizable toolbar that provides excellent access to quick toggling of viewing styles; and a tool for finding “dinosaur” newsfeeds, which haven’t been updated in a while. There is also something that is supposed to share your newsfeed collection with others, but it doesn’t work yet in the beta.

Update 2004-09-28: Ranchero have now announced they too will support syncing and bandwidth use managment in NNW2.Shrook 2, meanwhile, still has a much better solution in place for managing bandwidth issues: Their distributed checking feature is truly clever, whenever it works. They also let you access your newsfeed collection via any browser, so you can keep up when you are travelling.

A list of other Mac newsreaders can be found here.So if you have already shelled out $25 for Shrook 2, your investment is safe, but if you have yet to adopt a newsreader as your own, take a very good look at same-priced NetNewsWire 2 when it comes out of beta.