I wonder if I’m unique in my syndication needs. At the moment, I can’t really think of any one site that I regularly visit unless it has an RSS Feed and I want to see the comments.

I decided to import my 300 feeds list into outlook 12, and see how it handles it. There doesn’t seem to be problem with the size of the feed list, but I have several problems with the way the UI is handled compared to my favorite RSS Reader, RSS Bandit.

1.       It ignores categories. I’ll be the first to admit that my category list sucks (I got Australian bloggers in the Israel category, for instance), but it makes sense to me, and I have grown fond of it.

2.       There is no easy way to get a number of how many unread posts I have.

3.       There is no easy way to go through all the feeds from one feed to the other using the keyboard.

4.       It shows an image holder with some icon in it, which is bad since many aggregators are using 1x1 gifs to track readership. It is annoying to see the image and then have it disappear.

5.       No way to click on a feed and select Update.

6.       For some reason is show all the posts in my feed twice. It may be just the first time, but I’ll have to see

When I am reading blogs, I usually have to read about 80 – 120 posts, about 85% of them are full of technical content that can be hard to follow. About half the time I would think that the material is interesting but not relevant to what I do at the moment, make a note of it (in my head, not on paper or computer) and move to the next item.

This mean that such thing as clicking on a feed, scanning all the posts, and moving on is very important to me (newspaper style). I don’t see support for this in Outlook, which is a shame.

At the moment, I defined a search filter that bring me all the unread items from the RSS Feeds folder. With some custom grouping, I can get a very good sense of what is going on, and I can move between posts by pressing space. I guess that I can also do full screen viewing of posts and move between them (which would be cool).