So Reader is actually going away. July 1st, they're saying. I knew this was coming the second I saw that yellow banner across the top of the page last Wednesday, but I guess some part of me thought Google would blink. They didn't blink. They never do once the blog post goes up.
I've been using Google Reader since some time in 2007, back when I still argued with people about whether RSS was going to "win." It obviously didn't win, not in the way we thought it would, but it kept working for six years without me having to think about it, which is its own kind of victory. I've got something like 140 feeds in there, half of which I forgot I subscribed to until I started digging through the OPML export trying to figure out what to do with all of it.
And can we talk for a second about Google's habit of doing this? iGoogle is getting the axe later this year too. Wave died years ago (fine, Wave deserved it, that thing was a mess from day one). But Reader was actually good, actually used by real people every day, and it's getting killed anyway because it doesn't move the needle for whatever the quarterly priority is now. I get that Google+ integration is probably the real reason under all the "streamlining our product line" language, and that annoys me more than the shutdown itself honestly.
Anyway. I spent most of the weekend trying replacements instead of doing anything productive, so here's where that landed me.
Feedly was the first thing everyone pointed me at, and it shows. Their sign-ups apparently jumped by something like fifty times in the days right after the Reader announcement. They've got a browser extension that basically clones your Reader subscriptions in one click, which is the single best onboarding experience of the three I tried. The magazine-style layout is nice to look at but it's not what I want at 6:45am scanning headlines before work. I want a list. I want to hit "j" and move to the next item without my hand leaving the keyboard.
NewsBlur is the one I actually like the philosophy of the most — it's a small operation, one guy (Samuel Clay) building it mostly on his own, and he's been pretty open on Twitter about his servers getting absolutely hammered this past week trying to keep up with new signups. Respect for that, honestly, and I don't mind that the free tier caps you at 64 feeds since I could stand to prune my list anyway. The premium tier is something like a dollar a month, which is nothing. But the current site feels like it's held together with tape right now, and pages have been timing out on me more than once trying to load.
The Old Reader is the closest thing to an actual Reader clone in terms of look and feel, shortcuts and all, and I wanted to love it. Except it's been so overwhelmed that new signups are sitting behind an invite queue, and mine hasn't cleared yet. So that one's on hold for now, which is a shame because from what I saw of a friend's account, it's exactly the muscle-memory replacement I'm after.
None of this is a crisis, not really — I've got over three months before the actual shutdown, and I'm sure things will settle down once the initial rush dies off and these smaller teams get their infrastructure sorted. But it's a strange thing to feel a little bit of grief over a feed reader. I check that thing more times a day than I check my actual email, and come July I'm going to open a tab out of habit and get a 404 instead.
For now I'm running Feedly and NewsBlur side by side just to see which one I keep coming back to on its own, without forcing it. That feels like the honest way to test it rather than just picking whichever blog post told me to. I'll probably write about this again once I've actually settled somewhere, assuming I don't just get lazy and read everything on Twitter like it's 2013 and that's apparently where the internet is heading anyway.