Some of you have noticed that Feed Rinse channels have been somewhat unhealthy in the last few days.

Last Friday afternoon Feed Rinse began experiencing performance issues that we were able to associate to a large volume of requests for channel content. Unfortunately, the level of requests outpaced our server resources, and we had to temporarily limit the requests for channel feeds.

We’ve been working on solutions to this issue and will begin implementing them today to try to return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for your patience.

Update: Some of you may have noticed that channels are back up and running and it looks like they’re stable at this point.

This post is late. The right time to send it was a week prior to SXSW. A week prior to the massive SXSW twitter group. A week before hundreds (more?) of new twitterers got a first hand intro to the awesome power of a hyperactive twitter group.

Here’s the thing, twitter has this thing called RSS. And you know what that means, twitter can be feed rinsed by feed rinse. Jason Tucker has recently how-to’ed the process on his blog. Paul Watson blogged about it previously as well. I thought I was the only one.

That’s right, we’re removing the pricing layer on the Feed Rinse filtering service.  If you have a premium account today, it’s now free.  If you have any other account, you’ll notice that it now has a little more power.

To our paid account members: thanks.  We really appreciate you getting out your credit cards in support of our cause.  We hope nobody feels slighted for having paid for a service that’s now free.  If you look at your account, you’ll notice that we stopped recurring billing some time ago.  If you take one thing away, take this: we appreciate your support.  And we aren’t going to charge you for it.

We’ll soon have some new features rolling out as well, so keep an eye on us.

Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press just posted a solid review of Feed Rinse.

Thankfully, there’s now a machete to hack through the underbrush - a free RSS filtering tool named FeedRinse.

Read more at washingtonpost.com

…or nytimes.com

We’re excited to see mention of the app outside of the more traditional geek channels.

Just checking in to see if this thing is on (since we haven’t been posting much). We haven’t gone away, we just have our heads down and speakers up as we work to bring some new technologies to Feed Rinse, at least one of which is “big.” Much more coming soon.

Feed Rinse was just featured on Boing Boing. First off, thanks for noticing us Cory. We’re with you — ALL RSS readers should have filters. Feed Rinse is currently in good stop-gap mode to help the current feedreaders out. But, we’re just getting started. Look for some exciting new relevancy ideas coming out soon.

Today we added a feature to allow users to quickly add rinsed feed urls to their reader(s) of choice. Two clicks will subscribe your feed or channel to your selected reader. Here’s how it works:

1. Click on the feed / channel icon.
2. Select your reader.

We wanted to make it a two-click feature to differentiate us from Amazon.

It’s fun to just be listed on Emily Chang’s eHub. But, today we noticed that Marshall Kirkpatrick of The Social Software Weblog featured Feed Rinse as being one of particular note in this week’s eHub list. A quick thanks to both for taking a look and spreading the word. It’s always fun to see a shout out from our favorite blogs.

Speaking of favorite blogs, Saul took another look at Feed Rinse now that we’ve added channels. His post is here.

Feed Rinse premium accounts are now available to world! Enhanced features include higher filter capacity, channels, profanity filters, and more. Our features and pricing page has more details.

Welcome to the revolution.

Today, we’re excited to introduce channels to Feed Rinse users.

Your channels deliver posts from multiple feeds, rinsed of course, of any irrelevant posts. Monitoring more content sources for specific information no longer means monitoring more posts - rules let you block the clutter before it ever makes it to you.

Setting up a channel is easy. You start by selecting the feeds you want to pour in. Next, create any number of rules to define what content reaches you. Finally, add the subscription to your feed reader of choice.

There you have it. Haystack goes in, needle comes out.

Keen on metaphors? Here’s another: it’s like panning for gold (without the work).

Channels are available for cheap ($1/mo), plus ($3/mo), and premium ($5/mo) accounts.