Too bad Newsblur is pretty badly designed. I mean, there's a lot of bling, but it's completely confusing and sometimes ugly. Magic icons everywhere, wierd fonts -- two different dropdowns on each entry for god's sake. It looks like it was designed by someone who used their IDE as a template for the UI.
As an example of far too clever UI: Just try and change your password -- it's bizarre that it has no confirmation at all (I have no idea what my password is now). Not something I want to rely on, or deal with, or pay for.
Not that this isn't unexpected... web devs have always been very attached to their bling. That Feedly requires a plugin is... very odd. I don't expect it to last (either the plugin or feedly itself.. choose one), but maybe people are more credulous than I give them credit for.
Newsblur needs to simplify, simplify, simplify... but I suspect it's too late for that.
I'm switching to an rss to email digest script (modified rss2email). It's probably less bling than I want, but at least that minimizes the unnecessary crap, and works on mobile. It also has the benefit of limiting my tendency to refresh the feed lists every hour looking for procrastination sources. :-)
I'm working on a really, really minimal news reader (sign up for updates here: http://signup.viafeeds.com).
I like the idea of Newsblur and Feedly a lot, but I don't feel like either of them capture the simplicity that Google Reader used to have, before the unfortunate redesign.
I want to get back to that, and have a system that will seamlessly work across the web and mobile.
It'll be a couple months before it's ready for primetime, but I should be looking for beta users well in advance of that, and you sound like exactly the type of person who'd want to use this.
http://fred.rachelbythebay.com/ - is that sufficiently dense? I came up with it after realizing I didn't want any of the left, top, or bottom gunk in Reader. All I do is flip, flip, flip. Just keep pushing right (or sometimes, left, if you catch something neat and want to go back!)...
It's interesting, but I have ~200 feeds in 5 categories, and would like to be able to browse by:
1) see list of all feeds with unread counts (I don't see how to do that as a guest user)
2) click on a feed, see all articles in the feed (bold unread) (you sort of do this now, but indicating read v unread would be nice)
3) per-story, read in a dense but nicely-formatted way (Feedly does this great; yours is ok. Ideally be able to Instapaper too)
4) (optional) figure out which new articles in which feeds I care most about and "magic" those as well -- maybe using an interface like yours, or a "magazine" like feedly
I really have two modes of using RSS: reading as much as possible of those feeds, or wanting to be passively entertained. I'd potentially use two tools with a common backend.
I don't understand why someone doesn't do as close to a direct clone of Google Reader UI/UX as possible, and then clone Google Reader backend (e.g. the "Normandy" project).
I had this impression aswell. For all the attention that Newsblur is getting, I found the interface to be rather disappointing; their demo turned me away pretty quickly.
Feedly looks great, but yeah, won't use it in exchange of all my data. Perhaps if they come up with a standalone web version.
You can turn the button off in the preferences easily enough.
I think they ask for site permissions so they can extract RSS URLs out of the page via aforementioned injected button. Either way, Chrome extensions have visible source, so it's not too hard to vet it.
I don't have any method of paying online, well, there is, but it takes too much of effort doing the paperwork in bank that it's not even worth it. I don't live in first world country.
Newsblur has no such shenanigans and is developed by a HNer.