I know many words have already been written about Fever, but I’d like to provide my own impressions of Fever after a few days of usage. Rather than try to provide “first impression” type reviews, I like to let my thoughts simmer.

Fever is developed by Shaun Inman, who also developed the Mint site analytics package. The basic mentality behind Fever is that it helps you curate the most important content from a large number of feeds. It does this with an additional top layer of automatic aggregation and curation on top of a traditional RSS reader. Fever semantically looks at which stories have been posted most often and lets those rise to the top. Fever distinguishes between two types of feeds: “kindling” and “sparks.” Essential, must-read feeds are designated “kindling,” and supplementary feeds that mostly repost links are designated “sparks.” Sparks ignite Kindling raising the temperature of items and links that should not be missed.

Fever effectively links into the crowd mentality and social reposting, reblogging, etc. to let the most popular stories rise to the top. It would be very interesting in the future to see if Shaun can integrate external sources such as Twitter into the algorithm. Currently, the “Hot” news items are driven by my own biased, selected feeds. I have a good sample of tech blogs, but I have perhaps too many tech blogs. Tech stories dominate the Hot feeds view, and I’d like to see more stories about non-tech news, like design and ice cream. Right now I’m being overwhelmed by the same article over and over. In the past few days, it’s all been about the iPhone 3GS. Granted, this is a once a year event, so I may need to use Fever for a longer period of time to make a more accurate judgment about the spread of stories.

Maybe I’m being lazy and spoiled, and want Fever to do everything for me, but I don’t think that’s the case. Some topics simply have more feeds available. Ideally, Fever should be able to aggregate information from publicly available social trends, such as Twitter, Google Trends, and maybe even Technorati. Furthermore, Fever should allow me to assign a weight to certain feeds, so that certain feeds will have more influence on whether a topic reaches “Hot” status.

One of the other benefits of Fever is that I can access it anywhere I have an internet connection. Fever also comes with a special iPhone/iPod touch-optimized view. My only complaint here is that the performance is a little slow compared to Google Reader. It might be that I’m on a cheap hosting plan on a shared server, but the feed refresh rate is slower than NetNewsWire and there is a slight half-second lag when clicking on a group of feeds in the sidebar. Google Reader’s performance here is much better.

It is clear that Fever is not for everyone. The basic cost structure and installation process means that there is a limited niche audience. Fever is not a hosted solution, meaning you have to run it on your own PHP/MySQL compatible server. The installation requires a pre-purchase, initial server compatibility test. You get a compatibility confirmation code, which you use to buy Fever. After you buy Fever, you receive an activation key to finish the installation. Despite the complex setup process, the final install was quick and painless.

Also, in the era of free, hosted solutions, the lack of a trial, non-hosted nature, and the $30 price point will deter many potential adopters. I’m sure Shaun Inman probably thought this through thoroughly, and arrived at this decision that was best for his circumstances as a one-man developer team. And a recent tweet by Shaun says that sales are going so well that PayPal has launched an investigation to make sure things are okay. Not bad.

Fever is a definite contender in the crowded feed reader space. It has disrupted the way feed readers aggregate information, and for now, it has my vote.