My morning routine was interrupted with this unwelcome message from Google: “Google Reader will not be available after July 1, 2013.”
The “Learn more” leads to a Google Official Blog post, A Second Round of Spring Cleaning, in which this poison pill is buried among others. That post includes links to response articles, all negative. An article in The Age laments this as sounding the demise of RSS.
Google Reader and RSS are things that seem beloved by a few, unknown to many. For me, this is the only way I follow blogs. I have not decided which of twitter and facebook I find more detestable, both are unstructured deluges that exasperate my hyper-orderly nature. I recently was on the road for two weeks, did not open Reader once, then when back, opened it up exactly as the day I left and systemically worked through my folders and feeds. That is inconceivable with twitter and facebook.
Doesn’t Google have any travel hackers that can save this? Or turn it open source? Incidentally, Google’s internal travel system, from what I hear from an employee, is a quite elaborate bidding and costing process that would give travel hackers no end of enjoyment at figuring out how to game.
A number of articles have recommended alternatives, and there is also a MilePoint thread. My quick run through options such as FeedDemon, Taptu, Fever and more all seem poorly suited to replace Reader. Feedly comes up a lot but is overwhelmed today and I cannot get it going. I want my feeds without bells and whistles like magazine layout or ‘taking my temperature,’ and I want to open them in a browser tab across multiple platforms, not a standalone software. Finally, sin of all sins these days, I want to open them in a computer with a big-ass monitor, not a tiny portable device.
Readers, any suggestions? How will you follow blogs in the future? Hopefully you will follow blogs!
I have got feedly up and running, most of the annoying features are possible to disable, so far the biggest annoyance is the huge amount of space wasted in the compact view by separating “Today,” “Yesterday,” etc. And that it requires a browser add-in.
I just opened my google reader and had the same freakout. Definitely a sad day :/
Dude, I feel your pain. I got Feedly going. After trying umpteen Google Reader alternatives, I’m leaning towards Feedly being the closest to Google Reader, after you disable all the bloat. Feedly right now is based on Google Reader, although they say they have a back end ready to roll seamlessly on D Day.
Soooo sad….
@thegasguru – I lost track of how many things I had to disable in feedly, I still can’t stop myself from thinking it is a popup message box that I need to click and close to get to the real thing.
Well this ruined my day!! I love using Feedler RSS on my iPad and iPhone, which pulls from Google Reader. This might explain why Google isn’t being offered as a Reader option at many blogs for the past week or two. I tried many other readers and they all are useless.
Will the Follow button still work that feeds the blog to our blog dashboard? That would take care of some blogs but not all.
This absolutely blows. Pretty much all my content consumption happens via reader. Now the quest begins to find an alternative. Outside of search, this is the one product from google, I care for the most…
I use the Pulse app on my smartphone & tablet. LinkedIn is in the process of acquiring Pulse, so I would hope to see LinkedIn’s website include some of Pulse’s RSS capabilities.
I’m as devoted to Google Reader as many are to Facebook or Pintrest….this is such disappointing news.
I use Windows Live Mail. I could never get on with Google Reader when it first came out. And you can use Windows Live Mail just for RSS without having to have your email in there, unless you want that also.
@Jarvis – interesting suggestion, I will explore it. I use Windows Live Mail occasionally as a way to allow MailStore Home to backup my Hotmail accounts.
The milepoint thread pointed me to theolderreader which looks like exactly what I want, though their service is overwhelmed and tI have not been able to import.
[...] capricious killing of Google Reader led me to Google Takeout, a package of data export tools that is part of the wider [...]
While I had to pay a modest $12/year, I have found NewsBlur to be the closest in style to Google Reader and would recommend it as the best replacement.
just fired up feedly and I quite like it (after a few tweaks) – at least there is a plan B