Casey was talking about FeedLounge a while back, so when the beta finally launched, I plunked down $5 for a month subscription, mostly out of curiosity.
They seem to promise you the world, but I’ve found FL delivers what it promises – a hosted, Ajaxed-up RSS reader, complete with Google Reader-esque keyboard shortcuts.
Incidentally, I’m a big fan of Google Reader, because it facilitates speedy consumption of a lot information… learn a couple of keyboard shortcuts, and you can quickly read through your favorite websites on your lunch-hour. However, it’s nearly impossible to manage subscriptions once you’ve imported that OPML.
Feedlounge rectifies this by using a Rojo-like tagging function, to organize feeds into categories, without the pain of having to actually create and set categories, like Bloglines. All you need to do is add or remove tags from any given post, and the subscription structure will automatically adjust. Cool.
One gripe I have is the three-column layout – I know it is a cool selling-point, but I found it to be a bit of a pain… kind of buggy, especially when navigating via keyboard. Plus, I don’t really want to read my feeds by tag (category) – I’d much rather just read the latest posts, in what they call the “river of news” view. Nice that they provide users with a choice.
Bottom-line, if you’re still using a desktop client to read RSS/Atom feeds because you think all of the online services suck, give Feedlounge a try, m’kay?
Well, Google Reader definetely came around later than Bloglines… my point is that it is better than most other online readers… at least, for the way I want to use it.
Feedlounge is great, but there are little quirks here and there, and it seems slow for a “pay” service.
It will be interesting to see what kind of interfaces people will build using Google’s upcoming “API release”:http://niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/12/google_reader_a.html for Reader. And remember – it’s free. ;-)