Feedly Forces Its Users To Create Google+ Profiles 251
somegeekynick writes "Feedly users, a lot of whom migrated from the now-defunct Google Reader, are now finding out that they will not be able to login to the service without a Google+ Profile. In a blog post from Edwin Khodabakchian, which was posted almost at the same time the change rolled out, the reason for the change is stated as following Google's own move from using OAuth to Google+ for authentication. What has riled up a lot of users, as can be read in the comments, is that this change has come without warning and a lot of feeds are now being 'held hostage' by Feedly, especially for users who are reluctant to create Google+ Profiles."
Not a Story (Score:5, Interesting)
From TFA:
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Re:All your accounts are belong to us. (Score:4, Interesting)
If geeks had 1% of the organisational skill of a bunch of illiterate factory workers at the beginning of the 20th century, stuff like this - and almost all of our First World problems - would be trivial to deal with.
For this one, my suggestion would be for everyone nagged to create a G+ page to fill their page with dildos and friend only Google executives. Use competitor Facebook to spread the word. Once a few million people have done this, G+ becomes a joke.
Re:Pump up the numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, first, you missed the bit about it being retracted.
But besides that, Feedly has nothing to gain by pumping up Google+. (Unless there is some money changing hands under the table).
Google is out of the feed reader business, so all you really need is an account at Feedly. They would like to pawn off the
authentication server stuff onto someone else. But they are just serving up news feeds. There is really no reason to
have any account details at all on hand, and they could just hand out random numbers for accounts.
The problem here is that Feedly is finding it just as hard to monetize RSS as Google did, because, quite frankly, RSS was never
intended to be monetized. It was intended to bring you to feeder's web site.
But once you have things like Feedly and before that Google Reader scraping the full stories linked to the feeds, it becomes unprofitable
for feedly, and unprofitable for the Feed sites, because nobody visits the sites anymore.
I read a couple dozen feeds. On some feeds I never visit the site. On others, I have my reader (not feedly) set up to automatically go to
the site, scrape the page via Google Mobilizer and show me just the text. No pictures, adds or any of that.
The upside, those things aren't fetched from the site, saving them bandwidth. The downside, the site makes no money from me.
Re:All your accounts are belong to us. (Score:3, Interesting)
I couldn't get to the whois information of www.startpage.com. Could you?
Funny enough, whois doesn't report any info on nsa.gov, either.