Sunday, June 23, 2013

Post Google Reader: Feedbin, Newsblur, Feedly - all disappointing at the moment

I'm scrambling as usual, so no time for a full post. I've been running through Feedbin, Newsblur and Feedly today. I paid for both Feedbin and Newsblur, and Feedly is free.

My biggest disappointment is Feedbin and Reeder.app -- the sync isn't working! Feedbin says I have 270 unread, Reeder.app says 1086. Reset didn't help. Next disappointment -- both Feedbin and Newsblur didn't get my Google Reader custom names for feeds. Only Feedly picked those up.

Newsblur (open source!) is far too social. It insists on showing me comments as I try to read my feeds. It shares to Pinboard in the web app, but not in the iOS app. No Reeder.app support. Newsblur is strict folder hierarchy - no tags, no acyclic graph organization. No URL sharing. Newsblur has best performance and most features, but so far it's not right for me. I'll try again in a month or so.

Feedly has the very irritating plugin model and no Reeder.app support. It's my emergency fall back.

Feedbin has URL type share to pinboard; that's enough for me since I use Pinboard tags to control IFTTT routing to app.net, twitter, and kateva.org/sh. Feedbin's tag model is a much better fit to my GR org than Newsblur's hierarchy. That's really big for me. I'm very glad I can now 'hide' all tagged feeds. Renaming feeds are unsubscribing is very awkward; I'd argue there's a bug with that UI. (Tip: rename feeds you don't want to 'z', then when all done with name repair save, then select all 'z' then remove.)

Ugh, this will be a hard transition. There's still no true heir to GR's basic functions, not even counting all the abandoned features it had.

If not for the Reeder sync problems I'd go with Feedbin, but that's a bad fail. For the next few days I'm happily back to Google Reader (7 days left!), I'll see if Feedbin's sync bug clears itself.

4 comments:

MaysonicWrites said...

I pretty much agree with your evaluations: another one to try is Feed Wrangler. I've heard a few good things about it, and it seems to have a sound business model.

I've also backed Rachel Kroll's (rachelbythebay) Kickstarter project, although at present it doesn't look like going through.

There are also possibly Digg Reader (!?) and AOL Reader (!!??).

John Gordon said...

AOL Reader?! Holy cow, I'd not heard of that one:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/21/4452762/aol-reader-site-discovered-a-week-before-google-readers-demise

What's next? Microsoft Reader?!

I set Feedbin and Reeder.app both to 0 items, and now they seem roughly in sync ...

Martin said...

What's about 'Your Hive' (HiveMinded)? I got an invitation some time ago but there's apparently no app support (yet?) …

Feedbin works – the counting issue is results from Reeder syncing only a time-limited number of articles – but in many aspects too simple. How can I for example see the URL of a subscribed feed? How can I rename a feed (many feeds have ugly names by default)? There's also not much transparency around feeder – yes, there's a blog but there's almost no documentation, there's no community, nothing … Feedbin looks pretty much like the hobby of a developer. That's OK but not what I'm looking for in the long run.

JGF said...

Yes, Feedbin is a one dev show. Awesome talent but... On app.net he said that will change. Feed rename works via settings but is tedious. He needs more people and funding.