rss readers, round two

[go_gentle]

I was a pretty heavy user of google reader, so I was pretty annoyed when Google decided to close it down. Luckily, my annoyance didn't last long, since The Old Reader was pretty much a perfect fit for what I was looking for.

Three months later, the folks at TOR have quite reasonably decided that keeping a system up for 420K users is way different than the 10K they signed up for and thus they will be scaling back, which, from the way they've described it is quite reasonable for their mental health but does mean that I'm looking for a new reader again.


Things what are dealbreakers, in roughly a priority list:
1. cloud based. not roll-your-own.
2. the ability to import my feeds from elsewhere
3. the ability to see the feeds i'm reading, whole text, cleanly, with no web 2.0 content discovery bullshit
4. folders
5. the ability to show only unread items
6. the ability to sort unread items from oldest to newest
7. a willingness to fully fetch all items from a feed (and no more), no matter how frequently or infrequently it updates
8. a reasonable sense of timeliness to feed fetching
9. a display of a count of items unread
10. a willingness to handle a moderate number of feeds (more than 50, less than 200)
11. a free trial period

Things what I would like but do not require:
1. the ability to sign in via google
2. a speediness to feed fetching
3. a minimalistic design aesthetic without managing to hide the crucial buttons
4. free
5. a sense of humanity displayed by the project owner(s)
6. some sort of quiet home page/summary page so it's not all feeds all the time, which i find a little exhausting

Things what I do not care about:
1. social anything
2. mobile/tablet app anything

So far, I've tried inoreader, feedly, and digg.

inoreader is unlovely (a minor problem) and feels laggy, even if it isn't (a less minor problem). It's also displayed some odd behavior around updates, though i'm willing to give it a while longer to see if that was caused by imports.

feedly i find the the design of pleasing, but i can't quite get past the sense that it's waiting to spring some web 2.0 opaque 'we know how you want your data' bullshit on me.

digg would be my favorite so far, but it can't sort by oldest, which is a complete dealbreaker for me, the reader perpetually 3 days behind in her news.

anything else i should try? have opml file, will travel, etc, etc.

Comments

[cyprinella]

I'm paying for Feedbin because at this point I am a big fan of services that have a business plan besides "Erm, ads?" I think it meet most if not all of your deal breakers although I'm not quite sure what 3 means. I think the trial period is "put your credit card info in and you've got 3 days to cancel before being charged" like Pinboard. I definitely never feel like it's not loading stuff in a timely fashion, and because it's a funded site, the owner's made a lot of improvements to site speed and reliability from when it was in beta. The one thing that it does that I think might not fit what you're looking for is that when you add a new feed, it only seems to fetch the last 20 or so items. That may be all that's in the feed? No idea. It also has the ability to show you the whole article in the reader. So say you're following something that only puts the first few sentences in their feed (GRRRR). If you click the Readability button, it will attempt to pull the whole article in. Some sites work better than others but I find it works more often than it doesn't.