One of the features we’d planned (and built) for FeedLounge was the ability to save feed items from feeds you are subscribed to. We thought it would be a pretty cool feature, and one that Scott was particularly excited about.
However, as we talked to more and more people about features they wanted in a feed reader and how they use their current feed readers, this feature was rarely one that got people excited. Smart people like Steve actually considered it an anti-feature because of the way they use a feed reader.
The vast majority of people I’ve spoken to view their feed data as transient web information. If they want to store it, they’ll bookmark it via del.icio.us or some other system. If they want to find it again, they use a normal search engine. There were even people I spoke to that thought that no stored data at all would be just fine with them – once it’s out of the feed, it’s no longer relevant.
We’re certainly not going to go to that extreme, but when we get overwhelming feedback in one direction like this it doesn’t make sense to ignore it either1. In alpha 6, we removed this feature from FeedLounge2.
As we work towards our beta release, we’re going to be setting up scripts to remove item data older than 60 days from the production item stores as well (to help with performance and scalability). Once an item is removed from the production store, some combination of an excerpt and URL will still be available… we still haven’t worked out the details completely.
We may look at adding the “save” feature back in at some point, but it is out for beta. In the meantime, if you want to save individual items, you can flag them or tag them.
- Especially when removing the feature will help with initial scalability issues. [back]
- We had announced it would be removed a few months back, to very little response. [back]
This post is part of the project: FeedLounge. View the project timeline for more context on this post.