01 July 2013

To Infinity and Beyond

As we all know, today marks the death of Google Reader. Post-panic, I haven't been super diligent about finding a replacement, hoping something would just emerge and come save the RSS world. Well, that didn't quite happen so I've had to make the tough decision to narrow down the field to just one or two.

I've given a quick spin to The Old Reader, Newsblur, Byline, etc. and come to the conclusion that Feedly is the answer. The team is obviously dedicated to RSS, and their product seems to hit most of my check marks. I was hoping Digg would come in at the last minute and blow us all away, but that clearly hasn't happened. (I mean, the lack of read counts bothers me to no end on Digg Reader. How can I trust a RSS reader that doesn't give me read counts?) If you need a replacement for Google Reader, I recommend hopping to Feedly.

I'm currently getting another copy of my Google Reader Takeout and re-migrating Feedly in anticipation of Reader collapse. You've got a few hours to do the same.

Things I like about Feedly: Super easy to transfer over from Google Reader. In fact it's so easy you should do it even if you're not 100% sure you're going to use Feedly. Their iOS app is also very nice and syncs fast. I still plan to primarily use Reeder for iPhone, which is temporarily free. Both the web and iOS Feedly has lots of preference settings such as colors, views, and fonts. The super easy drag-and-drop interface for organizing RSS feeds almost sold me on Feedly by itself. I mean, this is already so much easier than how Reader did it. Sure, Feedly doesn't have a search function but neither does anyone else yet so that's okay.

This is it. Good bye Google Reader, it was real. Now I'm off to re-organize my thirty categories and 650 subscriptions, wish me luck.