Feedlounge Alpha
So I managed to get into the Feedlounge alpha. I saw a reference to them a while back and signed up for the beta and yesterday they sent out email asking for the first 100 responders to be alpha testers. Apparently they got over 175 responses in 10 minutes. I think it took me about 11 min before I noticed the email and responded, so I guess I got lucky.
So far notable features include:
- Feeds are tagged, not put into categories
- It’s trivial to keep track of read/unread on individual feed entries
- Clicking on the tag names shows all unread items in feeds with that tag sorted by posted date. It shows which feed the item is from, so it’s pretty easy to read this way.
Negatives:
- No way to open links in feed text in a new window/tab - planned to be fixed
- No package tracking, also planned to be fixed.
- All my imported feeds disappeared before I really got a chance to play with it much (One of the developers fixed this pretty quickly).
- Bit slow sometimes, but so is Bloglines.
- I’m not entirely sold on the 3 pane view. I like the extra screen real estate I get with Bloglines 2 pane view. However it does make reading individual items much easier.
Overall this looks really promising, if nothing else the ability to easily mark individual items read/unread will make it much easier to keep up.
alexkingorg:
Doesn’t your browser already have a mechanism for opening feeds in a new window or tab?
21 July 2005, 12:03 amClayton:
It does, but I’m used to using Bloglines, which does it for me.
I’m using Firefox 1.0.5 with the Tab Mix extension, so if I middle click, it opens the links in new tab, but in the background, unfocused. I’ll have to look and see if there is a way to make it focused, but this would still be an issue if my laptop wasn’t freakish and only had two buttons. Otherwise I’d have to control-click, which again is a minor issue, but slightly more of a hassle.
21 July 2005, 7:42 am