Why do RSS readers look like email clients?

Summary

There's a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It's not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It's more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There's no one there. There never was.I've been thinking about this feeling for a long time. Longer than I probably should, given that it concerns something as mundane as reading articles on the internet. But I've come to believe that these small, repeated experiences shape us more than we like to admit.So let me start with a question that's been nagging at me: why do RSS readers look like email clients?All Items47Daring Fireball12Pixel Envy8Kottke15Stratechery4Hypercritical8The App Store at 15Daring FireballOn Taking BreaksPixel EnvyAttention and Its EnemiesStratecheryDigital MinimalismHypercriticalThe Case for RSSPixel EnvyWhy I Quit Social MediaKottkeThe Slow WebKottke · 2 hours agoLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit.47 unread itemsUpdated 5 min agoThe shape is so ubiquitous it feels inevitable.If you've used almost any RSS reader in the past two decades, you know this layout intimately. There's a sidebar with your feeds organized into folders. There's a list of items, sorted by date, with little dots indicating what you haven't read yet. There's a reading pane where the content appears when you click.The shape is so ubiquitous that it feels inevitable. But of course nothing in design is inevitable. Someone made a choice, and then other people followed that choice, and eventually the choice calcified into convention.I know exactly who made that first choice,because I asked.His name is Brent Simmons. In 2002 he released NetNewsWire, the app t...