I’ve been a big fan of FeedLounge – and a paying customer – for a good while now (6 months?). But over the past month or two I’ve noticed my usage declining. I think there were a few reasons for that: (1) I had too many feeds, and couldn’t keep up with them; (2) the way I was using FL was making it hard to get through that backlog.
So, I was stuck.
And then, last week, Google Reader released a major update which finally made it a serious FL competitor, for me. It’s good – real good.
Most of changes and new features in GReader are basically catch-up, bringing them up to par with FL. I think the single most compelling new feature, and the one which make GR a candidate to replace FL for me, is the automatic-marking-as-read while browsing. With FL, the way I’ve been using it, I need to click on an item to mark it as read. Or manually mark a page of items or a feed of items as read. With GR, all I have to do is… read. The interface automatically notes when I read something (i.e., when I scroll to it) and marks it as read. This is hot. This kind of intelligence is long-overdue for software in general. It’s about time for software to observe how we use it and actively do stuff to help us out.
So: an experiment. I ruthlessly marked all my feeds as “read”, deleted a few heavy-volume feeds, and imported my OPML list of feeds into Google Reader. I’m going to use GReader as my main reader for the next week, then switch back to FL for the following week. At that point I may or may not continue for another round or two. After 1-3 rounds, I’ll make my decision.
Will FL keep its crown – and my $5 a month? Let’s find out!
