It scares me that they add 500,000 users and I don't understand how they make money.
At this point I'd like to either pay for a service or use something self-hosted to make sure I don't have to go through a painful transition again.
At this point I'd like to either pay for a service or use something self-hosted to make sure I don't have to go through a painful transition again.
Take a look at: http://www.feedafever.com
Just installed it. Works just like Google Reader, with a few bonus features. I don't have to worry about being shut down anymore.
You guys are missing the most obvious point and the big boys have already figured it out. Subscribe to Engadget, Gizmodo, etc.
What you'll get is an excerpt of the story with a "click this link to read the rest".
After I click, I'm on their site. I want to read/post comments? I'm on their site.
RSS is free advertising for content providers and a way to get more eyeballs. Google is foolish for putting all of their eggs in the social basket.
I remember like... what, six years ago? when people were arguing over whether or not this was an evil thing to do.
I don't know what the click through rate is like on RSS feeds with a statistically useful subscriber count, but Google Reader says my feed has 11 subscribers, meaning those 3 people who came through on my last post are 27%. I don't get that kind of click through with hundreds of real people following my Twitter accounts, or thousands on G+. A million social media followers is meaningless if only 10,000 of them click your links, and any publisher with sense realizes that. Email is only slightly better: http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benc...
Any extension that interacts with webpages needs that permission. Even if it's just to add a button. Before you go accusing them of selling information about your web browsing, you could at least check if they collect that information in the first place. Which is easy, since a network inspector is built-in to Chrome, and Chrome extensions are just ZIP files you can open up to read the code inside.
Hint: They don't. The plugin inserts a share image into the page, and the image is embedded in the plugin, not hosted on Feedly's server. It creates no network requests at all, so there's no involuntary information passing happening.
Fortunately the 'feature' can be disabled.