Please read this first: https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/…
Free account sign-ups are temporarily disabled while the servers are ramped up to accommodate the server loads and server existing paying customers.
You can follow the Twitter account for more updates.
https://twitter.com/newsblur
Give it a day or two. Google Reader says it is shutting down, and in about 24hours the number of paid subscribers has almost quadrupled, and the amount of free subscribers is something like 40 times what it was yesterday.
As a new paying subscriber and Google Reader refugee, it works pretty much like Google Reader except it is way slower (see above) at the moment. I do hope Reeder (iOS/Mac) will be available for NewBlur at some point. The iOS apps for NewsBlur suck. We interface is good though.
From what ive herd the founder has had to increase server capacity, This means more hardware more hardware = more setting up more setting up = Teething Problems 
To be honnest with you its worth supporting newsblur and seeing it develop. The difference between Google Reader and NewsBlur is Google Reader had 13 years to develop along with Google’s own service arcitecture and development cycles this has been created by one guy. To him i take my hat off. Keep up the awesome work sir. He’s said in a recent tweet “The waters are rocky now, but take note that I have some time to get things right. I’m working this week to get things stable, then scale.” Hes getting alot of traffic inbound and to be honnest hes doing a great job of communicating whats going on. Im sure free accounts may come back in the future but for now its Paid. Google Reader is closing down in July so its plenty of time to migrate over.
-This week the developer is focusing his time on making sure the service is stable
-Next week hes focusing on scaling so it loads quicker.
Took the words out of my mouth.