The long-awaited FeedLounge finally opened for public signups yesterday. For those of you not familiar, FeedLounge is a web-based RSS aggregator/feed reader. As a sometime-user of Google Reader and a sometime-user of Bloglines, and never very happy with either, I was excited to hear that this product might be what I was looking for. Geof has been alpha-testing for a while and has sung its praises far and wide, so I was all primed and ready to sign up yesterday.

Having been a FeedLounge subscriber for all of twelve hours now, I can say this: I am not disappointed. FeedLounge has an amazing user interface, good enough that though it’s just a web page, it tempts you to think that you’re running a separate application. It allows for feed tagging, tagging and flagging of individual posts, and, what may be one of my favorite features already, direct links to subscribe to comments for blog posts that provide you that capability. Fantastic!

FeedLounge won’t be for everyone. If you’re only subscribing to a dozen or so blogs, just use bloglines or something similar. Also, FeedLounge is a subscription service; $5/month or $50/year. Well worth it, IMO, but that’s your judgement to make. But for people like me who are subscribed to hundreds of feeds and want to be able to get at them from anywhere, FeedLounge is a great way to go.