Joe Shaw recently compared several aggregators, and had a few things to say about FeedLounge:

This is a $5/month service with a free 3 hour tour. How am I supposed to evaluate a complete piece of software in three hours? I need to be stranded on an island with Mary Ann for three seasons. Metaphorically.

We just can’t afford for people to come over to the demo server, dump a 1000 feed OPML on us, and then never come back. The load for OPML import is insane compared with the rest of the FeedLounge experience, so we need to do something to mitigate it. Didn’t have enough time in the first tour? Take another one. We’re not preventing you from it. We may open this up more in the future, but for now we want to make sure everyone gets a chance to try the FeedLounge experience.

Fortunately FeedLounge doesn’t have featureitis, so I was pretty much able to get the gist of it within 30 minutes or so. It’s a great feed reader: the layout is clean and it has AJAXy features which make interacting with the site pleasant.

I’m glad you like it, and thanks for noticing the design. Alex and I have worked very hard to create something with a sort of ’simple elegance’ that we would want to use ourselves. Keyboard shortcuts, Ajax where it can help, but not overly used “just because”, etc. It is the only news reader I use now, and with the upcoming features, we hope to covert more people.

It does have a two-paned view, but you can’t sort oldest-first.

Sorting oldest first is a feature up for vote by the FeedLounge community on our features voting page. It is currently the 4th most popular missing feature (3rd since the performance is back from vacation). Feel free to cast your vote for this, or any other feature. You only need a forum login to vote, you needn’t be a user (yet).

I am pretty sure it didn’t do groups the way I want — by clicking on the group and displaying all new items — but we’ll never know because my three hours have been up for a good twenty-something hours.

That is exactly what it does. Create a tag with 4, 5, 20 feeds, and when you click on that tag, only the new items show from those feeds.

So the end result? I would pay $5/mo for this if it had these features, but it doesn’t, so I definitely won’t.

What is missing from FeedLounge besides sorting items from oldest to newest? We want to make FeedLounge better for everyone, and your review of all those readers seemed very balanced and introspective.

Popularity: 68%