Here is a snip of a Feedly.com screenshot: Can you read the white-on-gray and gray-on-white text?

In the wake of Google’s announcement that they have decided to pull the plug on Reader, another free service, Feedly.com, experienced a growth of over 500,000 new users in the first 48 hours. I’m guessing they will get another surge of new users when Google actually pulls the plug.

So, problem solved.

Uh, not quite.

While the transition to Feedly is pretty straightforward, they are still using the Google API. What happens when (not if) Google unplugs that?

Almost as if they anticipated that question, Feedly is working on a paid premium version, implying that they plan to keep going. That’s nice, I guess.

Since Feedly seemed to be getting more recommendations than any other RSS reader, I gave it a spin. Sure enough, everything transferred over without a hitch, and almost instantly. All of my feeds were there. Feedly was a bit different, but a little experimentation sufficed to get things more-or-less arranged in the way I had them on Reader. Occasionally, Feedly seemed a bit sluggish, but adding half million new users in 2 days probably puts a strain on resources.

Unfortunately, I don’t much care for Feedly, so I will be checking around some more.

The main problem with Feedly is illustrated in the partial screenshot at the top of this article. Can you read the light gray text? The whole site is like that. I checked all of the themes, and I looked for some way to make that font readable without success. So I turned to the forum, and saw that there were many others who had the same problem. Feedly’s response? [sound of crickets chirping]

As need as I can tell, the folks at Feedly are about as customer-service oriented as Google, as in, NOT. Maybe that will change once they get their super-duper new premium service up and running, but if I’ve found something better by that time, they are unlikely to get me back. And if they can’t do better customer service than Google, they will end up in the trash pile of history as soon as someone else comes along with something better.

Needless to say, they aren’t getting a 5-star rating from me. I’m debating with myself over whether they rate two stars, or only one.