Feedly adds 500,000 users to service within 48 hours
updated 07:09 pm EDT, Sat March 16, 2013
Google Reader exodus causes service to use 10 times the bandwidth
Web-based RSS reader service Feedly has seen a large wave of users jump onboard, just days after Google's announcement. Half a million users have signed up for the service within 48 hours of the search giant saying it would close down Google Reader on July 1st, something which is making the RSS startup use ten times the bandwidth of what it used before the announcement.
A company blog post reporting the figures states that its main priorities for the next 30 days are to keep the service running while enduring the swathe of new users, to add new features weekly, and try to listen to suggestions made by its newest users. The company is already working on a clone of the Google Reader API, called Normandy, which the service will transition to using once Google Reader shuts down.
Feedly are not the only ones working on the Google Reader Shut-down issue. Zite added a Google Reader section that provides basic feed reading without using Google's infrastructure, social news site Digg is working on its own reader and API, and open-source RSS reading service NewsBlur is still working to deal with the sudden influx of users by adding 14 machines to its server farm.
