Posts in: December, 2005

I’ve updated the Greasemonkey scripts and bookmarklets so they work with alpha 6.

Part 3 of our Q & A series…

Will I be able to click on a category and have all the feeds in that category display on a single page?

FeedLounge has tags instead of categories, but yes - we show items from all feeds in a tag when you click on a tag in the feeds list.

Also, how easy it is going to be to add new feeds? (bookmarklet)

We’ve already got a couple of bookmarklets and Greasemonkey scripts available - including a subscribe bookmarklet.

Am also wondering if any mobile edition/browsing is planned at some point?

Yes, that is something we’d like to add - can’t promise when though.

Do you guys have a strong backend to deal with scalability?

We’re working very hard on this one - performance is important.

How will you market it? Subscription to a centralized website, or will it be available to install and run on private servers?

FeedLounge is a service you can subscribe to.

How well does it comply to syndication standards?

We handle both valid an invalid feeds quite well, thanks to our usage of the Ultra Liberal Feed Parser.

Need a hand with translation?

Not just yet, but we will once we get closer to moving the service out of beta.

FeedLounge has reached alpha 6!

As planned, this release is smaller in scale than the previous alpha releases. There are three main features added in this version:

1. Browser Compatibility - FeedLounge now works on IE 6 and Safari, as well as gecko browsers. All alpha users are encouraged to use FeedLounge in IE and Safari for bug hunting. This completes the stated browser compatibility goals we have for our beta release. We will explore supporting additional browsers in the future, but likely after our beta release.
2. Removal of Explicit Save - Items are now saved through tagging, not through clicking the ’save’ icon for each item. This is how our alpha users assumed it worked anyway.
3. Bug Fixes - in particular, we cleaned up some keyboard navigation issues in the “river of news” view and the Tags and History screens properly show items again.

Please let us know in the forums about anything that doesn’t seem right.

Part 2 of our Q & A series…

Why do all web-based feed readers suck so badly? Please help…

We’re doing our best.

Are you planning a “River of News”-Style feature where all news items from all feeds are displayed chronologically?

Yes, we added a view like this in alpha 5. Need to get those screenshots updated.

Podcast Support?

Web based feed readers aren’t ideal podcasting clients, but we do show any enclosures for an item with download links.

Will it be possible to post directly from FeedLounge to WP or TXP via XMLRPC ?

I doubt we will build this in as a feature right away, but I imagine we’ll have Greasemonkey scripts for posting via most blogging systems through their bookmarklets.

Does it have a OPML export function?

Yep!

Does it work in Safari 2.0?

Check back here on Monday.

When people sign up for the (very low volume) FeedLounge mailing/beta list, they often ask questions at the same time. We thought we’d answer some of these here in the blog:

Can you provide something that uses but doesn’t require Javascript?

The main FeedLounge interface strives hard to create a rich-client experience through your browser. Doing this requires quite a bit of JavaScript. We may have alternate interfaces in the future (a mobile interface is high on this list) that are not reliant on JavaScript, but the initial release will require a modern browser with JavaScript enabled.

Does “web-based” mean that my feeds are stored on the server as well? Does FeedLounge work with Opera 8.50, which is my main browser?

As a web-based service, all data is stored on the server and you access it with a browser. We are currently working towards compatibility with our stated browser requirements, then we will look at supporting additional browsers.

Can I use FeedLounge when I’m offline?

FeedLounge is an “online only” application right now. We understand that many people like to read their feeds on flights, etc. and would like to have an “offline” reading option and we will be exploring possibilities to offer that kind of functionality in the future.

Will FeedLounge be available in French / Spanish / Portuguese / Japanese / Russian / etc.?

FeedLounge already properly displays feeds in many languages; we have Russian and Chinese users in the alpha test and they report that the feeds display properly. While the initial release of the FeedLounge interface will be English only, we do plan to localize it and offer as many languages as possible in the future.

If you’ve got questions you’d like answered you can post them in the comments and we’ll try to tackle some of them in our next Q&A installment.

It’s been 180 days since we announced the initial alpha release of FeedLounge.

When we first announced the alpha release we had been coding furiously on the project for several months, and expected to be going into beta within a month - maybe two at the outside. 180 days later we’re still not to our beta release, but we are much closer to being able to being able to offer FeedLounge as a viable and reliable service.

Our alpha release has been invaluable; it has given us the information we need to make our beta release successful. Unfortunately, the alpha has also enjoyed a longer life than we’d originally planned.

Summary

This post is a long one. In it, we will cover some of the issues that have delayed FeedLounge’s public release, talk about the business model (paid vs. free, and when) and announce our beta (public) release date.

Technical Delays

As previously discussed in some depth, we’ve run into all sorts of trouble with scalability. When we began this project, I was working on the interaction design and saw a web based feed reader as “just another web application” - I was dead wrong (Scott already had a better idea about the scale we were looking at, but even he was surprised by what we found). The feed refreshing is a significantly higher load on the system than the actual users are - more like a search engine than a webmail system. We quickly found this out, and it fundamentally changed the way we had to approach the project.

With our initial group of alpha users, we took down the shared server we were using in about a month. Moving to a dedicated box (with 100 more users) bought us another month before the dedicated box became so bogged down it was unusable. After several weeks of effectively being “down” due to performance issues on the dedicated box, we brought FeedLounge up on our current hardware in our new data center - the hardware and rack space we will be using for our beta release.

However, the new hardware alone was not going to be enough. We also had to go back and rewrite major parts of the application - tuning them for scalability instead of for user facing features. Cool features are useless if the performance is so bad people can’t use them. We also decided to switch database engines from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

JavaScript debugging is also as much art as it is science, especially when you’re working on thousands of lines of code that need to work on Firefox, IE and Safari. We knew we were taking on this burden, but sometimes it seems to drag out forever to get one little thing working.

We have a few more optimizations we plan to make before our wider release, however we now feel we can successfully scale the service and have projected hardware needs based on real life metrics. While our alpha phase has been long, it has also been a great success.

Business Delays

Wether you want to or not, you can’t run a business in a vacuum. We’ve had a number of interesting conversations with various companies, each of which take time away from development as we explore possibilities. One of the conversations we are still engaged in should allow us to offer our free service sooner rather than later.

We’ve also had a few delays due to our service providers. We had a couple weeks of delays getting out temporary alpha server up, and we were one of the first customers in our provider’s new data center - which naturally resulted in a few delays.

While these delays did add up to a month or so, they certainly are not the reason we haven’t launched our beta release yet. They are, however, part of the overall picture.

Personal Delays

When it became clear (due to scalability issues) that we were not going to be able to get to our alpha release as fast as we thought, we ran into problems in other areas; both Scott and I have mortgages that have to be paid each month. When we realized that the launch date was going to be a bit further off than we had originally expected, we had to scale back our work on FeedLounge a little and take on projects that would help pay the bills. Unfortunately, one of these projects snowballed and took up nearly twice the time it was supposed to - which, of course, caused additional delays.

These delays have been expensive to FeedLounge in terms of public expectation and to Scott and me financially. We’ve invested in the FeedLounge hardware, and are paying the monthly co-location and bandwidth costs from our savings.

During my trip to the Bay Area, we even met with some venture capital firms and talked with some angel investors to try to alleviate the personal financial issues, but nothing has materialized so far.

Competition, Why FeedLounge can Succeed

While we’ve been in our closed alpha testing, a number of players have jumped into the web feed reader game. The most notable entries are Google and Yahoo! (through the new Yahoo! mail beta) who are, of course, making their feed readers free. A number of smaller players have also popped up, the space is certainly growing quickly (as expected).

While this competition hurts FeedLounge in some ways, it is helping in others.

When we first announced the FeedLounge alpha, there were very few options available. Judging from the beta sign-ups we received, we could have had hundreds of thousands of users within the first month of service. If we’d had to grow at that rate, we would almost certainly have failed. Now that there are other options out there, we can change our release plans slightly, with a more certainty that we will be able to succeed.

FeedLounge was created to be a powerful feed reader, capable of satiating the true informnivore. So far, the offerings from Google and Yahoo! have taken a different approach - catering to users with a small number of feeds.

The RSS reader included with Yahoo’s beta Web mail service is designed to appeal to the average RSS user, which according to Yahoo’s internal research subscribes to about six or seven feeds.

While they or others will certainly work on more powerful offerings in the future, we believe that the FeedLounge experience is superior right now and we’re confident that our extensive “future” list will continue to make FeedLounge very compelling.

Paid and Free Accounts

Our original plan for FeedLounge was to offer both paid and free accounts at the time of our first public launch. We’ve had to change our plans since then, and the initial beta release will be for paid subscribers only.

We will be growing the paid service organically. The income from our paying customers will allow us to add hardware and devote time to both scalability and new feature development.

As previously discussed, we are having conversations with another company that we hope will help us bring our free version online in the near term. If that doesn’t work out, we’ll keep looking at other options, including some creative ideas we have on the back burner.

Public Release Date

Our public beta release will be: Monday, January 16, 2006

We’ve got a good bit of work to do still, but we’ll be ready.