RSS feeds were one of the transformative developments of the Web - as a way of accessing news they allowed you to aggregate multiple feeds into one end user interface rather than having to visit each site separately and browse their content individually.

This was fine up until everyone and their brother started using RSS … suddenly the explosion of feeds meant that you could be subscribed to 20 or 30 or 100 feeds each producing 20 or more posts each per day. The stream of data became a flood and trying to keep up meant either skimming the torrent for useful stuff or dedicating some ridiculous proportion of your time to reading everything.

One of the more useful tools for dealing with the flood has been produced by Narciso Jaramillo. It is a tool called Snackr.

Snackr is an RSS feed reader application built on Adobe’s Flex and Air and can run on Windows, OS X, and with some limitations, on Linux.

What’s different about Snackr is that it randomly samples however many feeds you give it to monitor and presents its selection in a scrolling ticker tape style display. You can configure Snackr so that the ticker is on any screen edge, the rate at which it scrolls, whether it should stay “on top” when other applications are selected (I found this feature to be flaky on Windows and non-operational on OS X).

The great thing about Snackr is that by being on screen all the time you glance at it and serendipity leads you to items that using a regular feed reader wouldn’t have revealed unless you were to dedicate a lot of time to mining for the gold.

Snackr can import OPML files so you can export the feeds you monitor from Google Reader or your feed reader application. Snackr can also export its feeds in OPML format and you can of course, add individual feeds.

To tell the truth, while Snackr is a great tool for finding the gems in feeds it can also become just as much of a rat hole as a regular feed reader – in fact, because it shows you content you might otherwise have missed you can find yourself wandering far a field from your immediate business concerns.

So excuse me, but I have to get back to important stuff like the news feed article I just found on tying knots. Yep, there goes my morning.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.