So Wednesday happened. Google dropped that one line in their spring cleaning post about shutting down Reader on July 1st, and I've basically lost three evenings to this now. Not because I'm devastated exactly, more because I didnt realize how much of my daily routine was quietly built on top of a product I assumed was just going to sit there forever, unloved but functional, like a city bus route nobody thinks about until it gets cancelled.
I checked my subscription count last night out of morbid curiosity. 214 feeds. Some of those I havent actually read in over a year and should probably have pruned ages ago (looking at you, three different WordPress theme blogs I subscribed to in 2011 for reasons I cant reconstruct), but a solid core of maybe 40 of them is stuff I genuinely read every single day, first thing, coffee in hand, before I open anything else. Thats not a huge number in the scheme of things but it's my number, and losing the interface I've used to read it for going on six years is more disruptive than I expected it to be.
The thing thats actually been eating my evenings is that there isnt an obvious next place to go, at least not yet. Feedly announced within like a day that theyre building something called Project Normandy to import Reader accounts wholesale, and apparently they picked up something like half a million new signups in the first 48 hours after the announcement. I tried it Thursday night. The browser extension works fine, the import from my Google account was painless, but the whole thing still feels like a skin over a mobile app rather than a real reading tool, and I kept missing keyboard shortcuts I didnt even know I relied on until they were gone.
NewsBlur was my next stop and that one was a mess in a different way, understandably so. Samuel Clay (its basically a one-person operation, which I have a lot of respect for) posted that traffic had gone up by something like 10x overnight and he was scrambling to add servers just to keep the site from falling over. I got a 500 error trying to log in Thursday afternoon and a slow, half-loaded feed list Thursday night. Cant really blame the guy, he built a good product and now the entire internet showed up on his doorstep at once with no warning.
Then I tried The Old Reader, which I hadnt even heard of until this week, and found out they'd already paused new registrations because they got hammered too. Which, fair enough, but also: three attempts, three different flavors of "not quite ready for you yet."
Heres my actual complaint, the one thats not really about the tools. Googles post used this phrase about how "usage of Google Reader has declined" like thats a satisfying explanation, and maybe its even true, but it still reads like corporate padding on top of a decision that was probably made in a spreadsheet somewhere with no input from anyone who actually used the thing daily. I dont need them to keep it forever. I do think a product with a genuinely loyal, if smaller, user base deserved something better than four months notice and a line item in a cleanup post that also mentioned Google Voice App for BlackBerry, like the two things belong in the same paragraph.
Anyway. Im not going to pretend I have a conclusion here because I dont, Im typing this at almost midnight with four browser tabs open to four different reader signup pages and no real plan. Ill probably end up back on Feedly once the keyboard shortcuts situation improves, mostly out of inertia and the fact that half the internet is migrating there too so it'll get attention and bug fixes fast. But Im giving myself until closer to July before I commit to anything, since three days of panic-testing services that are all buckling under sudden load is not exactly a fair trial for any of them.
If anyone reading this has already landed somewhere and is happy, Id genuinely like to hear about it. My OPML export is just sitting on my desktop right now, waiting.