Feedest: RSS Reading And Bookmarking Gone Awry

A memo was delivered to the Profy editorial team recently, in which the creators of a new service of the feed-reading/social-bookmarking variety (I don’t know whether to call that a mismatch or a play on redundancy) asked for a review. While I don’t normally take such assignments, I decided to do so, particularly after taking a brief stroll through the website. Here goes.

The service, dubbed Feedest, is, in a word, terrible. Yes, terrible. Go, take a look for yourself. I’m sure you’ll arrive at much the same conclusion. And, heck, I could close the piece off right there, but it wouldn’t be very fair, so I’ll try to expound a bit.

What upsets me most about Feedest – apart from its title, of course – is its tone, and its design. It. Is. So. Damn. Ugly.

Orange? Really? Was that the top pick? I can’t imagine how one could arrive at such a decision. If Feedest’s creators are listening, do reconsider another hue, please. It’ll be in everyone’s best interest. The current swatch hurts the corneas. Hurts bad.

And, while you’re at the table, do some label processing, too. “Feedest” certainly ain’t the bestest.

On to the site’s design. What can I say? It doesn’t look good. At all. Everything’s way too bubbly, and there’s so much excess shading going on that the whole thing ends up looking like a miserable disaster. Even the ‘Ads by Google’ window is “floating”. Nasty. Nasty, I say.

And then there’s the content, the most important of which appear to be tags. Which I suppose I can’t fault Feedest too much for, considering the most popular social bookmarking utilities – Delicious, etc. – all operate around keywords as well. Only, the well-established of all the tagalicious institutions on the Web organize their terms somewhat nicely. There’s context at Delicious. Not much of that at Feedest from what I can sense.

Then there’s the shaky formatting job for individual RSS feeds. Mind you, it’s not the worst I’ve seen, but when it’s good for some and poor for others, you grow disaffected with the service fast. In a way I hoped there was some miraculous, precise work going on beneath the hood, but that just isn’t so. Oh well, too bad.

If you followed this review to the end, perhaps out of curiosity to see if I had a bright note to share about Feedest, I’ll have to disappoint. When I consider the fact that there simply appears to be no real necessity for Feedest, I can only shrug and question why it is anyone should bother with the product at all. It isn’t attractive in the least, and it’s not an intuitive piece of kit to use, so I think I’ll just go ahead and write it off as dead Web 2.0 weight, and urge its creator(s) to put it into early retirement. Soon.