Kindlefeeder Revisited: Premium Service

Since my last post about awesome websites that make the Kindle even MORE awesome than it already is, I’ve paid for premium service with Kindlefeeder.com.

How much?

I paid $19.95 USD for one year of premium service.

Why upgrade?

I’ll go into all the features a premium membership brings in just a minute.  But the main reason I upgraded was because I wanted to be able to subscribe to more than 12 feeds.  I think for free, basic membership, 12 feeds is more than fair.  Well, it’s free.   Any thing more than none would be fair.  But, I love my feeds.  I have a lot of sites that I want to read regularly, even more regularly than the every-day-or-two I check in with my Google Reader.

What comes with premium service?

So. much.

  • Unlimited number of feeds.
  • Ability to trigger a wireless delivery from the kindle.
  • Subscribe to feeds from processing-intensive* feeds.
  • Lots of delivery options. Lots. (See picture below).

Click the picture for a full view of my Kindlefeeder feeds management page.

As you can see, there’s a drop-down menu under delivery window.  From Kindlefeeder.com:

You can restrict the delivery of content from a feed to weekday mornings, weekday evenings, or weekends only. “Evening” means after 3 p.m. EDT; “morning” means before 3 p.m. EDT. “Weekends” means Saturday and Sunday. This setting affects both scheduled deliveries and immediate deliveries that you trigger yourself.

  • Schedule up to TWO automatic deliveries per day at times you choose.

If you recall my previous post, deliveries from Kindlefeeder were triggered by going to the site and clicking a button.  Not so with premium service.

Note that delivery options are the same.  An email to forward to your free Kindle address (Kindle 3 only); an emailed zip file you can unzip and load directly to your Kindle; a direct delivery to your Kindle (which will incur a surcharge by Amazon).  Or, at least, I’m pretty sure it will.  I’ve been too cheap to try it out.

One final note.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that scheduling automatic conversions / documents to your Kindle may violate the terms of service.  It’s unclear.  Or, it would seem to be so, but Amazon hasn’t yet responded to the creator of Kindlefeeder when he asked for clarification (in March 2009) and hasn’t stopped users from receiving emails from Kindlefeeder.com.  Yet.  Even more unclear, if one forwards them from one’s own email, does that violate the terms of service?  If I find out a clear answer, I will let you know.

* Processing-intensive feeds, like Yahoo Pipes and EchoDitto, take an “inordinate amount of time to fetch and update.”  They are only available to premium users because of the “disproportionate burden these feeds impose on the Kindlefeeder service.”

Edit 05.04.2012: Kindlefeeder seems to be gone. I’ve unlinked the links that were available in this post.

3 Comments

  1. Isn’t kindlefeeder and google reader double handling your rss feeds?

  2. Author

    I used Kindlefeeder for the feeds I knew I would want to read every entry from. I used Google Reader for those I might only want 1 out of 10 or so (like Lifehacker) or those that are graphic dependent (like damnyouautocorrect.com). Basically, they didn’t because I used them for different feeds.

    The point of the Kindlefeeder (for me) was not getting behind on feeds I read religiously because I could read them anywhere. But, honestly, since I got a smart phone… I’ve added all my feeds, except one or two, to Google Reader and I read them all there.

    But, for what it does, the premium service is useful if you have several feeds and want to control which feeds you get when.

  3. thank you very much for your opinion. now I know what to get with the Kindlefeeder premium service.

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