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Why Feed Readers Need to Identify Their User Agent

Alex Knight explains how Feedly has ignored the requests of content publishers by refusing to identify the number of subscribers for a given feed:

> Feedly is an extremely popular news reader service. They claim to have 12 million users, so they are by far the biggest concern to us at the moment. Since they aren’t reporting their user agent, this makes it extremely difficult for content producers to tell if anyone is checking out what they do. We have made numerous attempts to contact Feedly via email and on Twitter (see our tweets here and here), however, they have yet to provide any promising information about if and when they will start providing this data. In September Feedly released an API, which we dutifully did all of the integration on day one with their provided sandbox access. We are now into November, and they still refuse to give us access to their production API. Meanwhile we don’t have access to anything and they make money out of your content.

That is just unacceptable for a company in the RSS space. Shame on Feedly.