Feedly Feasts on Google’s Table Scraps by Adding Over 500,000 New Users

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

RSS fans rally behind Feedly

Google’s decision to shut down Reader on July 1st has created hundreds of thousands of RSS refugees, and so far Feedly seems to be the greatest beneficiary. According to the company over 500,000 RSS junkies have joined the service since Google announced it was shutting down, and that number will likely grow into the millions as we approach the summer.
Keeping up with that kind of sudden growth isn’t easy, and Feedly has admitted their biggest challenge so far has been keeping the service online. The company believes that it will need to increase available bandwidth by a factor of 10 just to stay afloat, but once this is done, they plan to start soliciting feature suggestions from new users.
Feedly struck a cord with the RSS community by offering to clone the Google Reader API, and thus make it easier for third parties to port over their apps. Reader for iOS and Press for Android are two highly popular mobile RSS clients that have announced plans to continue development after Google Readers demise, and Feedly is no doubt going to be the backend.
The only question now is who will emerge as the new RSS king. Feedly has a head start, but Digg has announced its entering the ring, and several other social sharing sites are looking long and hard at Google’s cast away users as well.
Anyone else here still using RSS? Who are you throwing your votes behind?
Follow Justin on Twitter or on Google+


More...