Mark Evans wrote on his blog recently:

If there was a way to post a “no vacancy” sign on my digital front yard, it would have been up long ago. There is no more room at the inn; I’m absolutely full and can’t eat another byte of whatever digital service you’re serving up, etc.

I feel the same way, but every once in awhile I find a service or app worth adding to the barn. I was introduced to Snackr over the weekend, an RSS ticker for your desktop. Tickers normally are trouble for me. Too much of a distraction, and this still might prove to be true with Snackr. However, the ticker format is also the reason why I like it so much. You see, it’s a daily struggle between me and my RSS feeds. Before Snackr, I’ve always taken an Inbox Zero approach to my RSS reader (Google Reader). I really like Google Reader too, but I can’t expect to plow through my new items every day so all is marked as read by the time I go to bed. I tried organizing my feeds, but I know it won’t work. I gave up trying to organize my email in folders a while ago. It’s a never ending time suck. Now I just have two folders/labels in email: Archives and Reply To. Everything else is either replied to immediately or deleted. Unfortunately, I can’t keep up with the amount of information in Google Reader as I can in Gmail using the same methods. I needed a new plan that will help me locate the articles that are most important and ignore those that aren’t in the most efficient manner possible. Snackr has met these needs so far. Here’s why:

• Having Snackr scroll along the bottom of my screen all day will ensure that I won’t miss what’s important to me. I might miss it the first, second, or third time around, but I will catch it at some point during the day. In addition, Snackr is more background noise than distraction because it’s open all day. It’s just another part of my display like my taskbar.
• You can set a timer on Snackr, so that all articles will drop from your ticker after a certain time frame. For example, I have mine set to four days. Once an article is more than four days old, it automatically drops from the ticker. I realize that this feature can be used in the traditional Inbox format, but I am so wired to clear out my Inbox that it would be very difficult for me to leave hundreds of articles in my RSS reader inbox for four days. A ticker is never ending, thus the urge to read everything does not exist. You just let it pass by and four days later, it will be gone without any effort on your part.

Screen shot of my display with Snackr at the bottom.

One more plug for Snackr. It was built using Adobe AIR, which allows for cross-platform desktop apps built using a combination of HTML, AJAX, and Flash.

Try it out and let me know what you think.