Two and a half weeks now since Google dropped the news that Reader is getting killed off on July 1st, and I think I've finally landed somewhere I'm willing to stay. I wasn't going to write about this because everybody and their cousin has already written the "Google Reader is dying, here's my feelings about it" post, and honestly I don't have much to add to the eulogy pile. What I do have is a list of the things I actually tried over the last two weeks, which nobody seems to be writing down in one place because everyone's too busy being mad at Google.
First stop was Feedly, mostly because it was the one my Twitter timeline wouldn't shut up about. They added something like half a million new signups in the two days right after the announcement, which if that number's accurate is a genuinely wild jump for a company most people had never heard of before March 13th. Feedly's move was smart: they shipped a "Normal" view mode with the exact same keyboard shortcuts as Reader (j and k to move, s to star, that muscle memory you don't even think about anymore) and a one-click import that pulls your subscriptions straight off your Google account, no OPML export required. I had it running in under two minutes. The mobile app is fine, not great, a little more magaziney than I want when I'm just trying to blast through 200 unread items on the train.
Second stop was The Old Reader, which I actually liked more in spirit, since it's basically a straight clone of Reader circa 2011, folders and all, run by two guys as a side project. Problem is it got flattened by traffic the week of the announcement and had to close new signups for a few days while they scrambled for more server capacity. I got in eventually but it still feels a little creaky under load, and the sharing and comments feature, which is the one thing I actually used in old Reader, following a handful of friends' shared items, isn't really there yet.
Then there's NewsBlur, run by one guy, Samuel Clay, who's been extremely funny and extremely honest on Twitter about his servers basically melting down from the surge. Respect for the hustle. It's the most "power user" of the bunch, with its own Bayesian classifier you can train to hide stories you don't care about, which sounds great on paper and took me about twenty minutes of fiddling before I gave up and just used the plain feed view.
And then Digg, of all companies, announced two weeks ago that they're going to build a Reader replacement from scratch and ship it before July 1st. Digg. The company that imploded from a redesign nobody asked for three years ago is now positioning itself as the responsible adult in the room. No idea if they'll actually pull it off in three months but I appreciate the nerve.
My pick, for boring reasons, is Feedly. It works today, it didn't fall over under load, and the shortcuts meant I didn't have to relearn anything with my hands. I'm annoyed about the whole situation in a broader sense though. Google Reader was never going to make anyone money and everybody knew that going in, but it was one of those quiet pieces of infrastructure a whole layer of the web depended on to move traffic around, and Google just switched it off with three and a half months notice like it was some Wave experiment nobody used. It wasn't a Wave experiment. People built entire reading habits, and in some cases small careers, around that little unread count in the corner.
If you're still sitting on the fence about switching, my honest advice is pick something this week instead of waiting until July 1st. Based on the last two weeks, the good alternatives are going to be creaking under their own success right around the time everyone else finally gets around to migrating too.