Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I just today got my feedlounge account.  feedlounge is an ajax-based rss aggregator.  Think bloglines with no postbacks and an interface similar to outlook.  This is my initial reaction after playing around with it for a little bit.

Having developed a couple of large scale ajax applications myself, I feel like I can evaluate them fairly well.  I like that you can switch views from horizontal (outlook express) to vertical (outlook 2003) styles.  This is key, because I know some people are very particular about how their lists are arranged.  I personally like my email in the vertical (outlook 2k3) style, so I set up my feedlounge in the same style, but then I realized that I couldn’t resize the columns, they are fixed width.  This is tough because for reading blogs, real estate is at a premium, I want to be able to give as much space as possible to the posts, if I could hide the list of items entirely that would be optimal and shouldn’t be too difficult to implement. When you are viewing an item there are arrows to navigate forward and backward through the items in a feed, I’d like to hide the list and just use the arrows for navigation.

The responsiveness is hard to gauge because its only in alpha stage and they haven’t fully ramped it up yet hardware wise.  However, given the small scale that they are on, its keeping up pretty well, I think they have over 200 users on one server and its acceptable.  As soon as they get the servers they’ve ordered I think it will be much better.

One feature that is missing is search.  I don’t see anyway to search through my feeds for a particular item.  You can “Flag” items for lookup later on, which is nice. When you flag an item, you can access it by clicking the “Flagged Items” link on the left.  I can’t help but compare this to bloglines, when you “flag” an item in bloglines, it simply keeps that item as unread in that feed, rather than move it to a flagged area, which I like better because I can look at my feeds and tell where I have unread items and it keeps my saved items in the context of the feed they are from.

A feature that bloglines doesn’t have is the ability to ‘tag’ items.  This is awesome.  You have a user defined list of tags that you can apply to any item, so when I’m looking at pics of Jessica Alba from forgetfoo, I can tag the item in my ‘babes’ tag for later reference.  This sort of organization is great because it affords the user more control, regardless of how the blog author intended the post.

One last thing, both the list of items in a feed, and the item detail panes are set in a ‘div’, so the mousewheel doesn’t work in firefox.  The fix to this is to put them inside of iframes rather than divs, you can still set the innerhtml using dhtml, but it makes the mousewheel active in firefox, so that would be nice to have.

In general, I think feedlounge is a really cool example of what ajax can do, but I doubt that I would switch from bloglines to feedlounge as my main aggregator, especially if its not free.  The simplicity of bloglines is the deciding factor.  I get my new items, if I want to save one for later reference, I can mark it as unread.  You can search through your feeds for a particular item.  I like that as soon as I read an item in a feed, its gone unless I search for it again.  With how many blog posts you read in a day, I don’t want them accumulating like emails in an inbox, I want them gone for good, so long as they’re searchable later.  This is why I think that an email style application isn’t neccesarily the best model for a blog aggregator.  I want the items in my aggregator to be about the here and now, and if I deem it worthy to be stored, I can make that choice.

I’ll keep using feedlounge to see if my opinions change, but its looking like bloglines for the long haul.