Feed Wrangler is also available as an iOS app.
With two months left to go, the post-Google Reader landscape of RSS services is still sorting itself out. The newest player? Feed Wrangler, a paid subscription service from the iOS developer of Check The Weather and Audiobooks.
Feed Wrangler launched Tuesday on the web and as an iOS app, sporting a membership fee of $19 a year. (Users can purchase access through the site or the app.) Developer David Smith said the paid model may be the best way for small services like his—and in the wake of Google’s demise, well, all of the services will be relatively small—to survive and thrive into the future.
“You can easily build a sustainable business by making a service with a few thousand delighted customers who each pay a monthly subscription fee,” Smith wrote on his blog in March. He said earlier in announcing Feed Wrangler: “I believe the reason that Google turned its back on Reader and left its users hanging is that they were users, not customers.”
Aside from the paid service, Feed Wrangler should be familiar to anyone who has used an RSS reader—in fact, it’s bit more stripped-down, visually than even Google Reader. It’s possible to import one’s collection of feeds from Google Reader into Feed Wrangler, although (in my testing of the service this week) it seems to have trouble distinguishing between various blogs from The Atlantic, and will just lump several of that magazine’s author feeds into one Master Feed of everything that organization publishes.
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