Hey Inoreaders, it’s time to go Pro

I look at you, freebie Inoreader.com account user, and I see me a few weeks ago when I had just a regular free Inoreader account. I thought life was perfect, that I didn’t need any more from RSS. But over time I had noticed new features, like Active Search, so out of curiosity I pulled up what other features one can get with a premium or professional account and I just had to go pro. What turned my head?

Starting with Active Search, you can already create a feed out of a search term whenever it appears in any new article in any of your 558 other feeds. You can turn that active search into its own RSS feed to subscribe to with something else, I could use it through the API if you were a developer, or you can format a webpage-like stream of it with Web Clips. That’s great chief, but right now you can only do that for one active search at a time. Go pro and bam you can create as many as you want.

Searching your feeds is cool if you’ve got insanely awesome feeds like I do. You know what’s cooler? Being able to searching ALL public feeds from which Inoreader aggregates, not just yours. That’s a pro feature, boss. Are you a pro or not?

Okay, let me paint you a real life picture: When you’re starting a new job, the first thing you do is set an Outlook rule for all the junk from HR to go to a Crap folder, and another rule with all mail from your boss only addressed to you with angry emoticons to go to your OhCrap folder. Inoreader just implemented a rules feature with that kind of power, but for your RSS feeds.

How can rules make RSS better? I can scroll down to the bottom of Google News and grab the RSS icon, or get the Drudge Report RSS feed, and drop that into my Inoreader stack. And because I hate NYC’s Mayor de Blasio and want to keep tabs on him, I can set rules on the Drudge feed to snatch any article that has “de Blasio imploding” in the article title, the body, or set it not just for Drudge but every single feed I have — and like the active search, pump that into a single new feed which, like the active search, I can publicly or privately export as an RSS feed of my own or as an HTML feed. Give it a try, you can make one rule with a regular free account, unlimited for a Pro account. Reread that, it’s complicated, but badass.

How about one mega export RSS feed of every single one of your feed, a firehose? Do you like to share articles and have a Gmail account? With a premium/pro account you can use your Gmail address book within Inoreader so that you can easily share articles to anyone without needing their email address. OCD about preserving formatting, then send as PDFs. And as of recently you can add a bunch of Google+, Twitter and VK.com streams as RSS feeds too — man, this InoReader is getting pretty hardcore for an RSS aggregation service, juicing so much power out of the “real simple syndication” service.

Following Google+ feeds without the heavy Google+ web UI crashing my browser, and being able to convert them into my own streaming website or RSS feed to give out, that’s reason for me alone to go pro and to be able to do that thirty times. Let’s just say I found some… nice Google+ feeds and leave it at that.

If those features don’t strike you as being worth a trip to Starbucks, maybe you belong on Feedly with the rest of the amateurs. Otherwise, here’s the upgrade link to the promised land: inoreader.com/#upgrade. Now run along, whip out your credit card and do the right thing, then thank me the Inoreader people.

Doug Simmons

PS: Forgot to mention, maybe my favorite thing about Inoreader is that they pump out new features that both are things no one else has thought of and things that are actually useful (and easy to figure out how to use). So when laying down a few bucks, keep in mind that you’re not only buying the features they have now, but what will likely be a larger list as time passes.