Saturday, August 10, 2013

We spend lots of time trying to forget in different ways

These photographs were taken a week ago at Salmi, which is in the northwest corner of Nuuksio wilderness, showing lake Salmijärvi which is rather shallow at this end, and the water is full of various water plants such as waterlily.

Are you using Feedly? It has become a popular alternative to Google Reader which was shut down during the summer. I migrated to Feedly, and despite some awkwardness here and there, Feedly has been a competent replacement to Reader. I'm following 312 RSS feeds which are divided into 12 categories.

Recently Feedly launched Feedly Pro, and this generated somewhat heated discussion.

Some felt that features of the Pro version should be available in the free version. And others felt that the cost ($5/month) is quite too much. In any case, Feedly sold out in a one-time only deal the available 5,000 "lifetime" Pro accounts in eight hours, even though the price was set at $99. Rather nice chunk of money for investing in additional hardware, development, etc.

Of course, it remains to be seen what "lifetime" means here, and how well Feedly is able to deliver promises of improvements in the service.

I'm not sure whether I made a good decision, but I bought one of the 5,000 Pro accounts, mainly because of the search functionality. The search has helped me already to find a valuable news item I remembered seeing but not precisely where. Given how much I'm using Feedly for work-related information gathering and personal hobbies etc., Feedly has become valuable to me indeed. However, Feedly search is rather slow currently. I hope it gets better with code optimization and scalable hardware.

(Posting title is from the poem The Feed by M.L. Smoker.)

2 comments:

Cedric Canard said...

I use Feedly too now but I tend to use it through a third party app called NextGen Reader which is a Windows 8 app. I hadn't heard about the pay option or the $99 lifetime option. It certainly would not be worth it for me but it sounds like you make good use of it. The NextGen app cost me $2.50 which is more of a donation than anything else because it works the same if you use the free version. In any case I'm glad Feedly stepped up to the plate as they seem to be a worthy replacement for Google Reader. The question, as you imply is: how long will they last?

Juha Haataja said...

Indeed, how much can one rely these days on a ICT service being available for a longer time. All these cloud-based services can disappear any moment, and then you need to migrate (in the best case) or try to salvage what there is to be salvaged of your data.

I'm using an old (Symbian-based) Nokia E7 phone, on which Google Reader worked somewhat well in the web browser, but Feedly isn't quite so well optimized for running on old hardware, and there naturally isn't a Feedly app for the E7 (and won't be).

Well, at least Feedly works in browsers on Mac OS and Windows, and there is an iPad app which isn't too bad.