Cote’s Weblog

On Steve’s recommendation, and his comments about it over the past few months, I got myself a FeedLounge.com account.

My quick-advice is: if you spend a lot of time in aggregators and don’t mind some 1.0-style problems, check it out.

I’m a Feed Readin’ Nutbird

People often joke that the only way to get my attention or tell me about something is to put an item in an RSS feed (the for:bushwald tag in del.icio.us is a good way ;>). I won’t dispute that. So, you can imagine that I spend a shit load of time in my aggregator. As such, decided on an aggregator to use isn’t something I take lightly: it’s more important than my email client, and only slightly less (or equally?) important than my IM client.

The point of all that background is this: I’ve tried switching from the venerable bloglines before, but it’s never stuck. This time I think it will, even despite a few missing features and the current (I hope just current) overall slowness of the system.

Pros and Cons

• Pro - I was able to quickly import my bloglines subscriptions. Feedlounge, of course, didn’t know what I’d read or not read, so it set everything to read (so to speak). I actually like this because it gives me a fresh start on keeping up with things. Now I’m “only” at 473 unread items instead of however many 1,000 I was at.
• Con - FeedLounge uses the concept of tags (most analogous in use to GMail) instead of folders. Unfortunately, you can’t order the tags at the moment. I sorted my folders in bloglines in order of “most important to read,” so I’ve been missing this feature. Whereas in bloglines I had the subscriptions I read hourly at the top, in FeedLounge they’re alpha sorted so I have to scroll around a lot to get to my “top tags.”
• Pro - On the other hand, being tags, you can apply more than one tag to each feed. Thus, it can show up in more than one “folder.” I haven’t fully appreciated this yet, but it was something I wanted in bloglines. I’ll see how it works out, or if it’s just a sugar-feature.
• Pro - You can also tag posts. I’m not really too interested in this as I’m a del.icio.us nut. Now, what’d be killer is if the “tag a post” feature was a way to add a del.icio.us bookmark. That’d flip my shit.
• Con - FeedLounge mixes together your read with unread items instead of just unread. In bloglines, when you click on a feed you only see items you haven’t read yet (or ones you’ve made sticky). At the very least, I’d like to toggle this in the Settings.
• Con - As you would expect from a just released web app, it’s painfully slow. That’s just growing pains; as a programmer, I appreciate any bear that can dance ;>
• Pro - It has 3 different types of layouts: Outlook style 3 pane layout, 3 vertical pane layout, and what I call “normal” (’cause it’s how bloglines did it…and I refuse to use that other term.) If you want to skim headlines, the 3 vertical pane one is good. If you’re looking at, say, a an picture feed, the “normal” layout is best. I haven’t come up with a use for the 3 pane one: I hate that email reader metaphor/layout. You can also switch between each layout by typing either 1, 2, or 3. Quick-keys in web apps are great! Being able to switch between these layouts (at least two of them in my case) is one of my favorite features.
• Pro - There’s great potential in the history feature. FeedLounge.com keeps track of all the posts you read (something is only marked as read if you click on it or “page” to it). On it’s own, this is good for trying to remember something you read and liked but were foolish enough not to bookmark. But what this part of the system really needs to become — and I’m dead serious about how much it needs to — is first an RSS feed and then a way to generate attention.xml. That alone would greatly differentiate FeedLounge from the competition.
• Con - The up and down arrow keys can’t be depended on to scroll the content. FeedLounge has a lot of key bindings, and the arrow keys are (sadly for me) used to navigate the tags and feeds your reading. I use the arrow keys extensively to scroll. I have a 12″ PowerBook, often with no external mouse (read: scroll-wheel), so I like using the arrow keys to move web pages and up and down. Granted, the space bar can be used to “page down” a post, but my reading style (much to Kim’s chagrin when she read with me) has been to frequently scroll through a web page, even as little as a line at a time. Perhaps I’ll get used to the new way of using arrow keys and the spacebar. But, in the mean time, I’ll be using the track-pad and mouse a lot.
• Con - As Steve pointed out, there isn’t an out-of-the-box way to expose a “blogroll” yet; I don’t think there’s even a public OPML URL. This was always a nice feature of bloglines: it was fun to both display the blogroll (or a link to it) on your blog, but even more fun to go browse other people’s setup in bloglines. I used this a lot to figure out how to arrange my feeds.
• Con - At times, on my 12″ screen, all the meta information that decorates each post can be too much. For the high-frequency feeds in bloglines (news and searches), I’d configured bloglines to display just the titles and nothing else. This allowed me to skim those high traffic feeds quickly. While you can certainly use the 3 vertical pane layout to achieve this, I’d still like to turn it on in the “normal” view. Again, this might just be a case of me needing to get used to the new way of doing things.
• Pro - The AJAX interface is nicely done. I’m quite enamored of all the “Loading” messages and screens. Well, it’d be nice if saw less of them, but at least they look good ;>

In summary: there’s a whole lot to like about FeedLounge.com if you live part of your life in an aggregator like I do. At the same time there’s some key, missing features, and some annoying 1.0 problems (slow speed, minimal configurability, no public facing/blog/JavaScript widgets). But, I’ll be happy to keep paying for it, ’cause my instinct tells me it’s gonna be good. I’ll be looking for a free t-shirt once it get acquired or wildly successful. Those bloglines bastards never sent me one ;>

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