I’ve read some good reviews of FeedLounge, the premium (meaning you have to pay for it) RSS feed reader. So the other night I decided to give it a whirl.
I signed up, paid via Paypal (the official and convenient payment service for Web 2.0) and imported my feeds. To say I am underwhelmed would be an understatement.
First of all, the layout is nothing revolutionary. Granted, you can easily switch between 3 different views (3 pane vertical, 3 pane mixed and 2 pane), but there’s nothing particularly novel about the way content displays. You can tag RSS content, which would be great if I could think of a good reason why I would want to. Tagging is like Pink Floyd’s song Money- the first 10,000 times I heard it I thought it was cool. Now I’m sick of it, but it still gets played about every half hour.
But none of that is the real problem. The real problem is that FeedLounge seems slower than freeze dried molasses. By comparison, Bloglines seems like greased lightning. At times, FeedLounge seems to be about as responsive as Bloglines. At other times, it seems much slower. I might pay for a lot faster. The same or slower doesn’t seem all that pay-worthy.
Another problem is the updating formula. Bloglines FAQ says it checks for updated content every hour. I didn’t have my team of mathematicians with me so I couldn’t decipher the FeedLounge FAQ on this point, but it seems that FeedLounge checks for updates somewhere between every half hour (twice as good) to every 48 hours (48 times worse).
Someone please tell me what I’m missing.
