I plopped down five bucks this week to try the beta of FeedLounge, an elegantly designed online alternative to such storied desktop RSS readers as FeedDemon and NetNewsWire. In fact, it's hard to tell the difference, at first glance, between FeedLounge and an offline reader like FeedDemon. (The three screenshots show the same feed using different views.)
Of course, the main problem for FeedLounge's developers is convincing folks that they need to pay $5 a month for what Bloglines and NewsGator are already providing on the Internet for mostly free (NewsGator does have some paid versions of its service). Still, it's an impressive feat and it was worth the Lincoln to see what Ajaxian technologies can do for the RSS-reading community.
My first task was inputting a list of about 900 feeds via an OPML import. Rather than handling it all it once, FeedLounge provides a notice that it will incorporate the feeds in batches until they're all there. This apparently keeps their servers from dogging everytime someone like myself comes along with a gigantic OPML file.
I can't tell if all my 900 feeds are in the system. And I'm not going to count them to find out. :) But it looks like they are, and they even maintained the folder structure I brought over with me when I exported the RSS feed list from FeedDemon. Still, FeedLounge isn't without its growing pains: the servers were down for four hours yesterday "due to the database server becoming non-responsive to write operations." Like any Web-based app, you're taking a crap shoot on whether the servers will be up when you need to access the service. And in this case, you're paying moola to use the service.
I felt the purveyors were a little grouchy with me on two occasions, but I can understand that with a new start-up that has has taken 12-hour days to complete. The first was my fault: I had a payment bounce back in PayPal and so I went in and paid them $5 for the first month. They returned my money and told me they could only accept money through their automated system. Fair enough, on hindsight. But it was a waste of my time to do this. The second issue was that I sent them a support request directly to their e-mail address and they didn't care for that, pointing me to the support forums. But he did answer some of my questions in the e-mail reply.
I haven't had a chance to try out the service enough on a daily basis to make an informed decision on whether it's better than other options. But I did find one extremely irritating action that the owners don't seem interested in changing. Whenever a RSS feed is malformed, a warning appears on each and every feed: "Invalid Feed! This item is from an invalid feed. You may want to contact the owner of the feed to let them know." This is extremely irritating and I haven't seen it elsewhere, except occasionally on FeedDemon when a RSS feed is poorly written that it can't be read.
Overall, I'd say it's worth the $5 to try the service for a month and see if it's for you. They also have a trial, but it's limited to 50 people at a time and may be hard to use. I think that FeedLounge is a good example of what we can expect from Web-based applications that closely imitate -- and possibly improve upon -- their desktop cousins. Still, I won't be uninstalling my FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and other RSS readers (yes, I have a lot) anytime soon.Read�|�Permalink�|�Email this�|�Linking�Blogs�|�Comments
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