I was about half way to alpha for my feed reader, and was working on it for about an hour a week. Given the competion rate, I probably would have finished alpha by November 1, 2005.

However, as everyone now knows, Google Reader was released 10/7. While this is technically a different product than that which I was building (more similar to Alex King’s), it will suit my needs enough for me to not want to continue on my feed reader. My feed reader was going to be a distributable web application. The typical user would either be an admin: download, install and configure; or a user: sign-up or sign-on to an existing installation. It would have been theoretically similar in usage to a Wordpress installation.

The feed reading services provided by Alex and Google are more of a “sign up for service on some central super-cluster” kind of deal. The reason I am stopping my project for Google’s and not Alex’s, is because Google’s is free (and I respect that very much). Alex posted a somewhat biased (and rightfully so) Google Reader vs FeedLounge, and while I have never used FeedLounge (no Opera support), Google Reader seems to be working very well for me so far. Good luck to Alex fighting that “800 pound gorilla”, he and his partner might need it.

I really wasn’t impressed with Google’s first stab at feed reading, and while there are still some issues with my browser of choice, I’m confident that because Google is behind it, they will soon get it right.

As for the backend code that I had thus far… I guess you could say it now fits into Joel’s “Throwaway” world of software. Bummer.

Edit: Regarding FeedLounge, it appears that there are plans of a free version with ads. My apologies to Alex. I guess I’ll have to wait to see when that is available (and also with Opera support) to make a comparison myself.