River 5 has been running on one of my servers now for about twenty-four hours and so far things seem to work perfectly. Order is restored and I feel connected with the news again.

River 5 is a feed reader that generate rivers of news. A river of news is a way of displaying items of feeds that presents the items in one or more feeds as a reverse-chronological list with a headline (if present), short text and a link to the original post. It’s very similar to the Twitter timeline. The main difference is that news rivers uses RSS and Atom feeds for their content, not a proprietary plattform, hence they are part of the open web.

You can see and use my rivers in the native views that’s included with River 5 here, or you can checkout my own simplified version of the viewer, that’s more optimized for my smartphone.¹

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently not using Twitter. I stopped mostly because I don’t like the debate-climate there. The limitations of Twitter that once made it interesting has turned it into a great megaphone for anti-intellectualism and it effects all of us when we’re using it. However, I did started to feel disconnected from the news of the world when my old, River 4-based, rivers stopped working right around the time i quit Twitter.

So I rebooted using River 5 and now I feel connected again. The river is basically my timeline. I decide what goes into it, the same way I did on Twitter. The difference is that the articles on news sites and the posts on people’s blogs are more thought-through than the quips we throw around Twitter. The same goes for the microblogs I include in the rivers. Even though they are basically the same as tweets, I don’t think they are as hamstrung by the format.