As you’ve probably heard, Google has announced that they’re discontinuing Google Reader on July 1. Most of you who subscribe to this blog use Google Reader or use an RSS reader that depends on Google’s Feedfetcher. Here’s a snapshot from before Google announced the end of Reader. The proportions have changed slightly since then as people are starting to leave Google Reader.
If you use Google Reader, I suggest you bookmark https://www.google.com/reader. Google has been tinkering with the menu you see when you log into their home page. Sometimes Reader is in the list under “More” and sometimes it’s not.
Try out a few RSS readers. You may want to start with Feedly as it is appears to be the most popular alternative. A half million people signed up for Feedly within 48 hours of the Google announcement. Feedly is available through your browser as a mobile app. It will synchronize across multiple devices like Google Reader, but has a very different user interface.
There are a lot of other alternatives, and I imagine more will appear over the next three months. Here’s a list of 18 RSS readers. That post started as a list of readers available on Linux, and all do run there, but I added notes on what platforms each runs on. Most of the readers run on multiple platforms.
You can subscribe to this blog via email. If you go to the web page for the blog, you’ll see a box on the right side where you can enter your email to subscribe. You may also be able to use your email client as an RSS reader directly. At least Outlook and Thunderbird are RSS readers, and I imagine other email clients are as well.
The solution I would like to see would be to have a web site that offers a generic API to access the state of all your feeds.
Then you would run your favorite rss aggregator on your machine (or through the browser) using that.
Just as you can use any email client you want with an IMAP server.
The best would be if the web site offering the service to maintain your feeds were community-run and based on free software. That way you could even install it on your own server if needed.
I’d like to recommend NewsBlur as a perhaps more sustainable alternative to Feedly. The had a recent blog post on what they are doing to ramp up for July.
I switched to Feedly and actually like it a lot. I used to use Google Reader on the web and Flipboard on my phone, but I now find myself using Feedly in both places. The interface took a little bit to get used to, but it feels fresh and alive so I like it. It is sometimes a little slow on the web and on my Android phone I sometimes swipe incorrectly and close the window when I don’t want to. Also, I wish it would open links in the Chrome browser on my phone and not in the Feedly web view, but otherwise I’m happy with Feedly for now.
I switched to Feedly, but I’m not impressed. Thanks for the link to NewBlur; seems interesting, but wow I don’t think I like the interface. And after a week, I am still using Google Reader ::sigh:: Maybe I’ll just be more productive instead of reading all the feeds I’m subscribed to.
@Mark Galassi Something like: http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki ?
I am really looking forward to seeing what digg.com puts together. I think they could be the one that really takes most of the users in the end.
http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader
I’m taking a wait-and-see approach. My preferred RSS reader (Reeder for Mac/iOS) claims that it is going to have a solution for replacing its Google Reader dependency. I’ve tried other readers and I prefer the basic UI of Reeder.
I switched to tt-rss and am pleased with it. You need to set up a webhost to store and serve the feeds (can be a new host, or install within an existing website), but if you are experienced with doing that it is simple to do (what I got stuck on is technical details – tt-rss does not use ‘PHP safe mode’ and most webhost providers run that way by default) . There is an Android app which works well, and you can get the same experience as Google Reader of syncing between web and app.
[www.phillipkent.net/blog/replacing-google-reader-tiny-tiny-rss-and-gmail-next-my-do-list]
Only goes to show the need for my invention – Internet Glue!
http://bit.ly/13fBdwc
:-)
This is why I don’t trust cloud services, even when they are done by a huge company. You never know when they will go away, and if you will be able to get your data out.
I use Sage, which is based on a Firefox extension. It gives me a panel on the left hand side of the screen that I can pick which feed I want to read, then it takes me to the home page; not leeching bandwidth by copying it to another website.
The upside is that all my feeds are on my machine, and are just bookmarks to the raw RSS feed. So if I want I can switch to another extension (as I have several times, starting with Harbi Xenu, then Sage, then Sage2 when Sage died, then back to Sage as it updated for a new edition of Firefox and Sage2 lay dead). If I want my feeds on more then one computers I can use Firefox cloud sync or portable firefox and a USB key.
Mark Galassi: I like your idea, but why do you need the intermediate? Then you are adding an additional point of failure.
I just can’t believe it’s going away. I wrote about my distaste herE: http://knowyournetworks.com/google-reader-is-going-away/