UPDATE: I am no longer part of FeedLounge.

After a year of percolating and many months of development, I (along with Scott, my partner in this particular crime) am very pleased to announce the alpha launch of FeedLounge!

FeedLounge is a web-based feed reader that is a wonderful hybrid of the speed and power interface of a desktop application and the benefits of a web-based application. Pick your favorite web application buzzword: AJAX, tagging, keyboard commands, etc. – FeedLounge has got it. Take a look at some screenshots, and go through our little tutorial to get a feel for what FeedLounge has to offer.

While this is only an alpha release, I believe the user experience will already challenge existing web based feed readers, and may give more than a few desktop feed readers a run for their money as well.

We’re currently running FeedLounge on this server, but we’ll be moving it to a big beefy server soon so we can bring on many more users in our beta launch. This alpha release will help us determine exactly what hardware requirements we have so we don’t run into the problem of s-l-o-w server response. We’ve got a few more features we want to add before the beta release too – so many features, so little time. 😉

So why did we build a web-based feed reader when there are already a few out there, and there are good desktop feed readers already?

For me the answer is rather simple: none of these give me both a fast, powerful reading interface and access to my feeds from multiple computers and platforms. I also love designing software – especially something I use often throughout the day. 🙂

We’ve got a lot of work still to do before FeedLounge is ready for general release, but everything is going well and we’re very excited about it. Stay tuned, we’ve got some great stuff planned.

UPDATE: Scott’s post says some of this better than this one.

This post is part of the project: FeedLounge. View the project timeline for more context on this post.