FeedShow Review

I gave FeedShow, an online rss reader, a try and was very impressed with... how useless it is. It comes preloaded with a ton of rss feeds (CNN, BBC, Washington Post etc). there's no way to remove all of these unwanted feeds in one click. No, you need to go to every feed and unsubscribe (and confirm) each one manually. To make things worse, the core functionality of an rss reader would of course be to read rss feeds. This does not work in Feedshow except for the preloaded feeds. I added 5 feeds for different blogs I follow, I then clicked read and all I got was:

No items available. If you just added this feed, new items will appear shortly.

They must have another definition of shortly because after 2 hours, they still weren't displaying anything.

Every feed also has a rss to pdf button. I tried this on a couple of the preloaded feeds and every time I got the following error message:

The reCAPTCHA wasn't entered correctly. Please go back and try it again.

OK, great... except for the fact that there's no recaptcha anywhere on the page. As if captchas weren't already annoying enough, FeedShow has actually managed to find a way to make captachas even more annoying: They're asking for a captacha they're not even displaying and that you cannot enter anywhere.

Conclusion: FeedShow is an epic fail.

Lodsys Files Patent Suit Against 30 Companies

Lodsys, a well-known patent troll, has filed a myriad of lawsuits alleging the infringement of '078 Patent'. The abstract of the patent reads, "In an exemplary system, information is received at a central location from different units of a commodity. The information is generated from two-way local interactions between users of the different units of the commodity and a user interface in the different units of the commodity. The interactions elicit from respective users their perceptions of the commodity."

If that is confusing for you, the voluminous description of the background of the "invention" reads, in part, "One of the core purposes of the invention is... the ability to learn interactively and iteratively from the users of products and information systems anywhere in the world while they are in use—without having to travel to their sites (or without having to bring them to a testing laboratory). Since this is a two-way link, it also offers the ability to respond meaningfully to customers and users based on worldwide, local, organizational or individual needs regardless of where they are located."

The patent includes a number of uses and dozens of subsidiary claims that allow it to cover a range of functions related to consumer interaction utilized by websites across a vast range of industries, as evidenced by the complete list of companies sued in this recent Lodsys blitzkrieg:

• Bank of America Corp.
• Epicor Software Corp.
• Hoovers Inc.
• Market America Inc.
• Network Solutions
• Overstock.com Inc.
• Sleepy's
• The Estee Lauder Companies Inc.
• Becker Professional Development Corp.
• Cabela's Inc.
• Charming Shoppes Inc.
• HSN Inc.
• Nike Inc.
• The Men's Warehouse Inc.
• Tivo Inc.
• Foster and Smith Inc.
• Recreational Equipment Inc.
• Walgreen Co., Rosetta Stone Inc.
• Dell Inc.
• AVG Technologies USA Inc.
• GFI Software Inc.
• Kaspersky Lab Inc.
• Raxco Software Inc.
• Symantec Corp.
• Webroot Software Inc.
• GMCI Internet Operations Inc.
• Playboy Enterprises Inc.
• RK Netmedia Inc.
• Score Internet Group
• Vouyer Media Inc.