Three weeks ago Google announced Reader is getting killed off on July 1st, and I've spent basically every free evening since then poking at replacement RSS readers like a guy testing mattresses at a furniture store. Lying down, getting up, lying down again. None of them feel exactly right yet, but I think I've narrowed it down enough to write something up.
For context: I've used Google Reader since around 2008, and my OPML export (yes, I checked, this is the first thing you should do if you haven't already) has 138 feeds in it. Some of those are dead blogs that stopped posting back in 2010 and I never bothered to prune. Old habits.
The contenders so far:
Feedly. This is the one everyone's been pushing since the shutdown announcement, and I get why. They've got this "Project Normandy" thing going where they're building out their own backend so the service doesn't just die the day Reader does, which shows they were paying attention. The browser extension pulls in your Google Reader subscriptions in about four seconds flat, more than I can say for some of the others. My one complaint: the default view is a magazine-tile layout with big pulled images everywhere, and I hate it. Took me ten minutes of digging through settings to get back to a plain list. Once I did that, it's honestly pretty good.
NewsBlur. Built mostly by one guy, Samuel Clay, and it shows in a good way, lots of little thoughtful touches you can tell somebody actually cared about. It also chokes a bit when you dump 138 feeds into it at once, at least it did for me on a Tuesday afternoon. The training feature, where you tell it which kinds of stories to hide, is a neat idea. In practice I never used it enough to matter.
The Old Reader. This one's basically trying to just BE old Google Reader, same layout, same keyboard shortcuts, and there's something charming about that. Except it's running on what feels like donated server time, and it's been falling over under the traffic since everyone and their mother decided to try it this month. Got a 502 error twice yesterday alone.
Right now I'm leaning Feedly, mostly out of laziness if I'm honest, the import was painless and it syncs with Reeder on my phone, which I'm not giving up without a fight. Ask me again in June though, when the actual deadline is closer and everyone's panicking for real instead of just poking around like I'm doing now.
Completely unrelated tangent, but has anyone else been watching Bitcoin this week? It crossed $100 for the first time ever a couple days ago and it's still climbing as I type this. A friend of mine bought some back when it was under $20 last year, half as a joke, and now won't shut up about it over lunch. I still don't fully get where the value's supposed to come from besides "other people also think it has value," which is either brilliant or insane depending on the hour. Not touching it myself. Watching from a safe distance with a bag of popcorn.
If you're one of the people who hasn't dealt with the Reader thing yet, don't wait until June to start. Export your OPML file today, it's under Reader settings, then Import/Export, takes about ten seconds, and at least then you're not starting from zero when July actually rolls around. Try two or three of the replacements for a week each before you commit to one. It matters more than it sounds like it should, since you'll be staring at whichever one you pick every single morning with your coffee for the next however-many years.