So Google Reader is dying. Officially, anyway - the actual death date is July 1st, but emotionally it died yesterday afternoon the second that "spring cleaning" post went up. I read it on my phone standing in line at the deli on 4th, and I actually said "no" out loud, which got me a look from the guy behind the counter who just wanted to know if I wanted the everything bagel toasted.
I have 214 feeds in Reader. I know the number exactly because I checked this morning, twice, like it was going to change. Some of those feeds have been in there since college. Some of them are for blogs that stopped updating in 2009 and I never bothered to prune them because Reader just... worked. It sat there quietly and did its one job and I never had to think about it, which I think is the highest compliment you can pay a piece of software and also exactly why nobody at Google could justify keeping it funded.
I get the business logic. I do. Its not a secret that Reader wasnt a huge product by Google's standards and RSS as a category has been "dying" for years according to basically everyone except the people who actually use it every day, which, hi, its me. But knowing why a thing happened doesnt make you less annoyed about it happening.
The scramble
I spent this morning doing the thing everyone with a tech blog is apparently doing this week: exporting my OPML file and testing replacements. Feedly is the obvious one and I tried it first around 9am, and its fine? Its got that magazine-tile look that I don't love, I want my feed list to look like a feed list, not like Flipboard, but its fast and it imported everything without choking. I heard they got a genuinely absurd number of signups in the last 24 hours, which, sure, of course they did, they were basically the only ones who had a good answer ready to go the moment the announcement hit.
Then I tried NewsBlur and it would not load for me at all for a good twenty minutes around 10:30, just spinning, which I'm assuming is the entire internet doing exactly what I was doing at exactly the same time. Cant blame a small team for their servers falling over on the one day everyone decides to show up at once. I'll try it again tonight when things calm down.
Old Reader (yes that's an actual product, not just a description) also exists and I poked at it but it looks like it hasn't been touched since 2011 and I don't fully trust it not to also die in three months, which, ironic given the circumstances.
Small tangent, not really related: I also can't believe how much of my day got eaten by this. I had actual work to do. Instead I spent two hours reorganizing folders in a feed reader like it was 2006 and I had nothing else going on. There's something a little embarrassing about how attached I got to a UI I never even really looked at, it was just infrastructure, like plumbing. You don't think about plumbing until it stops working.
The actual opinion part
Here's my take, and I dont think its a popular one on the RSS forums today: this is probably fine, long term. Reader had been getting worse for a while anyway, they killed the sharing/social stuff back in 2011 and that was the real gut punch for me, this is more like watching someone finally take the body off life support. The format isnt dying. People read feeds through a hundred apps now that arent called "Reader." Flipboard, Pulse, whatever Twitter is slowly turning into. The specific product is dying, the habit isnt.
Doesnt make today less annoying though. I've got until July to pick a permanent home for 214 feeds and about a decade of read-later muscle memory, and honestly the hardest part isnt the migration, its retraining my thumb to open a different icon. That's going to take longer than any of this technical stuff.
Anyway if anyone has strong opinions on Feedly vs NewsBlur vs something I haven't tried yet, my inbox is open. I'm not going back to checking forty sites individually like some kind of savage.