A Week Into the Great RSS Scramble

So it's been a week since Google decided to kill Reader, and I've spent way more of that week than I'd like to admit poking around at replacements. If you missed it (how?), Google announced on the 13th that Reader is getting shut down July 1st, lumped in with a batch of other spring-cleaning cuts. I'm not going to rehash the whole announcement, everybody and their cat has already written that post this week. What I actually want to talk about is what happens after you get mad about it and go looking for somewhere else to put nine years of feed subscriptions.

Short version: it's a mess right now, in a good way and a bad way at the same time.

The good way is that there are actual options. I tried NewsBlur first because a couple of people I follow on Twitter were raving about it, and within about ten minutes of clicking around I got hit with a message saying new signups were paused because the site couldn't handle the load. Samuel Clay (the guy who runs it, solo as far as I can tell) posted an update saying he was buying more servers as fast as he could. That's kind of amazing to watch happen in real time actually, one dude's side project getting steamrolled by a few hundred thousand orphaned Google Reader refugees in the space of a weekend.

The Old Reader had the same problem. I got in fine on Sunday night but by Monday morning they'd turned off registrations too and put up a message asking people to be patient. Feedly seems to be handling the traffic best, probably because they'd already built an import tool for exactly this scenario and got ahead of it by announcing something called "Normandy," which is apparently their own backend they're building specifically so people aren't stranded when Google flips the switch in July. Smart, honestly. They were already sitting on a pile of former Reader users from people who'd switched over for the UI even before this news.

My actual opinion here, and I know this is not a hot take: I'm annoyed but not surprised. This is the fourth or fifth Google product I've had to migrate off of in the last couple years and at some point you start to notice the pattern. iGoogle is on its way out later this year too. Wave got the axe a while back. I get that Reader was never a big moneymaker for them and I get that they're trying to focus, whatever that word means this quarter, but there's something a little insulting about how casually it got announced. One paragraph on a blog post, sandwiched between some cleanup of API stuff nobody cares about. Nine years of a tool a lot of us built our entire information diet around, gone with about as much ceremony as clearing out a junk drawer.

Anyway. Where I've landed, at least for now, is Feedly with the Reeder app on my phone pointed at it instead of Google's API, since Reeder announced they're adding Feedly as a source. It's not identical to Reader, the folder organization works a little differently and I miss the keyboard shortcuts being exactly the same, but it's close enough that I stopped noticing within a day or two. I exported my OPML file from Reader (do this now if you haven't, don't wait until June) and importing it into Feedly took maybe ninety seconds.

One small complaint while I'm here: why does every single one of these replacement services insist on redesigning the reading pane with a bunch of card-based, magazine-style layouts? I don't want images blown up huge, I don't want a Pinterest board, I want a plain list of headlines I can blow through in five minutes over coffee. Feedly at least lets you switch to a title-only view once you dig into the settings, which is the only reason it's staying installed on my phone.

I'll probably keep poking at NewsBlur once their servers catch up, since I like that it's a smaller operation and I'd rather pay a few bucks a year to someone directly than end up dependent on another free tool from a company that might decide feed reading isn't strategic anymore in another two years. Funny how fast you get gun-shy about that stuff once it happens to you once.