Don’t euthanize something so vital to so many.
Google just announced that they are going to shut down Google Reader, a very powerful and (until now) reliable RSS reader.
This is very bad news for my work. I’m a researcher, and spend a lot of time in GR every single day.
So what next? What alternatives are there? Is there a good replacement that’ll pick up my pile of GR feeds?
I’m firing up this post with the first answers I discover, and will update as they come in.
To be clear about my requirements: I need something for a laptop environment, primarily. RSS feeds my research, which means lots of writing, multi-app work, etc. Secondly, it should synch to Android, the phone platform I use. That’s where I RSS when traveling.
Possible successors to the Google Reader crown:
- Newsblur. Currently in the lead in Hacker News’ poll. It’s hard to assess its quality, as the Blur site is apparently being hammered. No luck with OPML upload yet.
- Netvibes. A browser-based dashboard tool. Here’s their guide to importing your OPML. (thanks to Veronica Pejril for the reminder)
- Bloglines. Old-school reader. Sometimes I use this when teaching RSS, because of its simplicity.
- Feedly. Aimed at mobile devices. It does play on the Windows desktop. Instructions on migrating there from GR.
- Prismatic. Looks Feedly-ish. Can’t tell if it imports OPML yet. (thanks to Amanda Sturgill)
- Fever, a/k/a Feedafever. Looks like you have to install it on your own server – here’s one description of the process. And another. (thanks to D’Arcy Norman and Steven Kaye)
- The Old Reader. Seems to be a Web-based reader. Currently overwhelmed by GR refugees. (thanks to Dimitris Tzouris and Grant Wythoff)
- PressForward. A WordPress plugin from the Center for History and New Media. Currently in alpha.
- BlogTrottr. Sends RSS feed content to your email inbox. Accepts OPML files easily. (Thanks to Michelle G)
- Taptu. Looks like it’s best for mobile devices, not desktops. (via CNet)
- Feedbooster. Web-based client a la Netvibes. Imports OPML quickly. Runs some interesting searches on the results. (thanks to Mark Justman)
Which is best? What else is there?
We should expect a burst of RSS reading innovation over the next few months, as eager developers rush into the Google-shaped space. Feed Wrangler, for example, is in the works (more here). Digg says they’re working on one (thanks to Our Level).
ADDED: More reactions, including a White House petition to nationalize Google (!), and Hitler’s inevitable response.
(thanks to Steven Kaye for the sad alert)
My first thought, on loading Reader today, was that I needed a “Not OK” button. Google dropping Reader is sorely disappointing, but the good news is I’m hearing good things about Feedly.
Agreed, Kathleen.
Will Feedly handle a big swarm of feeds? I’ve seen it only with little piles.
I’ve just migrated, and so far, so good. Feedly ingested my Reader categories and seems to be keeping up with my feeds quite well. And both the browser interface and the iOS app seem well-designed. (Admittedly, though, I don’t know what qualifies as a “big swarm” of feeds in the Bryan Alexander universe. I suspect what feels like a lot to may just be a little pile.)
I’ve got around 64 folders/categories of feeds, which is probably a cry for help, I know.
Never used NewsBlur. I think Feedly is a great tool. But, to be honest, I haven’t used ANY newsreaders to speak of in the last two years or so. I fall into the “RSS is dead” category. I subscribed to everything, then found myself overwhelmed with “interesting” information. I never had time to read it all, and I never had the energy or the will to prune my sources down to a manageable volume. So I fit the pundits’ trend pretty well as someone who nowadays gets my online news mostly via social media. Oddly, I tend to feel somewhat guilty about that, like I’m somehow being lazy by not “getting out there” and consuming news “properly,” but … there it is.
I used to be an RSS militant, Nathan. Wanted everyone to use it.
Then I backed off a bit – not for the reason you cite, but because the process was too geeky for many (academic) users.
But still mainlined RSS every day, personally. The big volume actually works for my purposes, since I need to track patterns across the landscape.
Twitter, Facebook, etc are useful for getting _some_ signals, but not at the power level I require.
Oh, I totally get that. I find Facebook and Twitter very unsatisfactory, not to say horrible, ways of getting news. On another level, I also find RSS to be a really intuitive and powerful technology. (I actually felt even more strongly about OPML back in the day. Why hasn’t that ever caught on more widely? You can do ANYTHING with it.) It’s just that I’ve never really found a way to consume RSS feeds on a regular basis that actually works effectively with my own habits, and I suspect I’m not alone in that.
I agree about the intuitive aspects, Nathan. It was hard to find if a site had an RSS feed, often. And RSS readers were often invisible, rarely discussed beyond geek circles.
And yet! What a superb tool for info overload.
Nathan, I think the sense of guilt – which I share when I find myself not tending to the feeds enough – may be driven by a fear of homogenization of the conversation. Twitter often brings me the news I didn’t know I needed to know. But even with a diverse and well-curated follow list on Twitter, one tends to see a couple of themes or events dominating on any given day. When I catch up on what RSS is delivering, I often find gems which then become my contributions to theTwitter conversation. If there are not a fair number of us reading and sharing the great work that can appear on the less-visited blogs and news sites, will the conversation not become even more centralized and bland? It’s impossible to drink the firehose. But an ecology of diverse readers and sharers can really make the marketplace of ideas more vigorous. Tldr: prune your subs and find a reader that works for you.
Yes, agreed on all counts. To quote the horse in Animal Farm, I will work harder!
There is a discipline involved, I agree, Ed. It’s curation, really – and that’s what any social media user must perform. We find, prune, reorganize our Twitter followings, podcast subscriptions, LinkedIn stalkees.
Reblogged this on AECs and commented:
After you read the suggestions in the original post, come back and tell us what reader you use. You are using a news reader, aren’t you?
Me? Google Reader on Windows laptop + Android phone.
“best” is subjective. YMMV. I *love* Fever• http://feedafever.com
Am I going to have to install that on this server, D’Arcy?
well, you don’t *have* to, but if you want to run Fever˚, it is a PHP app that installs on a server. Could be a local server, or one on the web. I host mine in a subdirectory of my blog domain, so I can access feeds from anywhere.
I like that politically, D’Arcy. But I don’t have the tech skills now. Maybe something to work on?
it’s no harder than installing wordpress. but yeah. self-hosting on a server is going to be a limiting factor for a lot of people. the achilles heal of the reclaim project…
And I haven’t even gotten to the WP install yet. I’m going this site through DNS mapping.
I would hang head in shame, if I had the time to.
I’m an old time user of Bloglines myself. I’ll have to show you the really nice “cease and desist” letter they sent me when I wrote a Bloglines reader app for iOS some years back.
Feedly was super simple to transition onto. All it took was typing in the address and clicking login with Google credentials. Done. I’ve moved on and removed the Reder tab from my auto launch set.
I’m firing up Feedly for Chrome browser now, Jon. Thanks.
Is it still robust, David? Would love to see that letter. 🙂
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Might be a good time, as well, to revisit this nice little nugget of tech journalism from the end of last year:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network
Ouch, Nathan. And yes.
Interesting to compare with Yahoo’s attitude towards Delicious.
I have friends who swore by the pre-redesign Google Reader with its sharing features. (I don’t know anybody who particularly liked the redesigned version; that may have been the prelude to killing it off.) They’ve been speaking about “The Old Reader”: http://theoldreader.com/ I haven’t used it much yet, but it seems like it’s designed to make the transition as smooth as possible, as well as to maintain all the features of Google Reader (including the ones Google Reader is currently designed to have).
Greetings, Amod. I’ve added TOR to the list. Site seemed to be hammered down right now, though.
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I lived in Google Reader. Then I filled it so much that I was trying to drink from a fire hose. Then I let it sit. Then I narrowed the stream with a favourite folder. Then I fed that folder into FlipBoard and it is to this day my favourite morning read (of all the different streams I check in FlipBoard).
That’s my long way of saying RSS is still something I want to keep alive.
On a different note, this would seem to signal that Feedburner will soon die as yet another neglected Google service. This post seems to offer quite a few easy-to-transition alternative services… Will the same hold true for Feedburner?
I’d keep both, big collection (I feed a lot of blogs and sundry projects) and have a favorites folder (as well as a 2nd tier overflow, a McGee’s closet). Feeding the favorites folder to different app for morning reading is a good idea but will have to wait on pruning the big one (ongoing but now in more intensive mode) and finding a new home.
Vanessa, I’d just like to personally thank you for referencing McGee’s closet. Fibber McGee is something more people should experience.
Thanks ~ I agree and have been thinking for some time what a perfect image the closet is for online information overload (not to mention my own bookmark and rss reader sites)
Classic radio explains nearly everything, Mordecai and VanessaVaile.
Good question about Feedburner. We should probably plan against the possibility that Google ends it as well, Dave.
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Thanks for this round-up, Bryan. I use Google Reader extensively. I’m exploring different options now. Bloglines is running verrrry slow; Feedly’s interface is frustrating (it’s hard to find the scrollbar with my laptop’s trackpad, I prefer an alphabetical list to a reverse chronological one and I can’t figure out how to change it, and I have to keep resetting my view preference for each folder of feeds); The Old Reader said it could only import 1,000 of my feeds, and there are more than 33,000 users ahead of me in the import queue, even after several days; and Goodnoows is slow and doesn’t appear to have a way to highlight (in boldface or otherwise) which feeds have new content. Next up: Newsblur. I may need to try D’Arcy’s solution of Fever.
I’m surprised how few options there are out there for a primarily text-based, cross-platform news reader that works in a browser, not through e-mail. Can we blame Flipboard and Pinterest for all of the visually pretty but not particularly practical (at least for us power users) relative newcomers?
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I think we can blame that magazine-style interface. People find those comforting analogs, and probably enjoy the (small) stream size.
So what are you using lately, Bryan.
@lesliemb: Depending on your browser of choice, userstyles and Greasemonkey may have solutions for you. For example, this userscript makes Feedly look more like Google Reader:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/162237
Thanks so much, Steven! I used Tampermonkey on Chrome to install Readly, and it makes Feedly much more to my liking.
I’m focusing on Bloglines and Feedly, Steven.
That script looks interesting.
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I do believe all the concepts you have offered on your post.
They’re really convincing and will definitely work. Still, the posts are too quick for starters.
May just you please prolong them a little from subsequent time?
Thanks for the post.
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