I Want to Trust Feedly, I Do

Over the years I have grown accostomed to Google Reader too much. Like many other people, Google’s decision to pull the plug on the service made me sad. However I am not one of those people who believe providers of free services have an obligation to their users. No. What needs to be done is to find an alternative.

The tragic thing is; so far all the alternatives I have considered basically suck. Akregator is an excellent piece of software. But I need to be able to sync my subscriptions between my computers. There are open source projects that I can host myself. But they are all PHP based, and I really don’t want to serve PHP applications on my servers anymore.

Feedly seems to be the best hosted feed reader out there. But it requires you to install a chrome plugin to use it. What’s worse, this plugin is asking for the permission Your data on all sites. Why does Feedly want all my data?

The answer above is from a co-founder of the service. He claims that they don’t access the data. Then six minutes later he answers the very same question again, this time from somebody else:

Is it possible, in just six minutes a new feature is conceived, designed, coded and made live? The first answer says we don’t access your data and the second one, just six minutes after the first, by the very same person, says that this data is mined for suggestions.

Google killed the online rss reader market by offering a powerful yet simple app for free. Now we are left with these choices.