Feedbin

Yesterday I said I was going to try Feedbin, a potential replacement for Google Reader, when Reeder was updated to support it. This is where I admit that I’m not a patient man, when there is something new and shiny to try out I want to try it right now. Needless to say I decided to open a Feedbin account and give it a try even though Reeder doesn’t support it yet.

I’ll save you a lengthy writeup of my initial impressions and just give a bullet point summary of my thoughts.

The Good

• It successfully imported my feeds from the file Google Takeout provided me.
• The site always uses Hypertext Transfer Secure (HTTPS) (I’m still baffled by the number of sites that use unsecured connections).
• The web interface, both on desktop and mobile systems, is very clean and straight forward.
• Adding new feeds is very easy (I’m surprised by the number of Really Simply Syndication (RSS) clients and services that fail in this regard).
• No advertisements.
• You can easily export your list of subscriptions.
• The developer is pretty upfront about planned features for the service.

The Bad

• No way (at least that I’ve found) to rename feeds or tags.
• No way (at least that I’ve found) to easily delete tags, you have to remove the tag from each feed individually.
• The interface doesn’t allow you to sort feeds based on tags.
• It’s currently unsupported by Reeder (this isn’t Feedbin’s fault, but it’s an important feature for me).

The Indifferent

• It’s not free (which is why there are no advertisements).
• There’s a complete lack of social media features (I’m not against social media features, I just don’t use them).

Overall I like the service so far. While part of me still isn’t used to paying for an online service the other part of me that enjoys a complete lack of advertisements and other attempts of monetizing user data is quite content. When you sign up on the site it notifies you that your card won’t be charged if you cancel within the first three days. Since I like what I’ve seen so far I’m going to pay the whopping $2.00 and try it for an entire month.