So it's been about three weeks since Google dropped the Reader bomb, and I've finally stopped putting off doing something about it. If you missed it (how?), Google announced back on March 13th that Reader's getting shut down July 1st. I've had my head down with client work so I let it sit there, unread-count climbing into the thousands, feeling vaguely doomed every time I opened the tab.
This weekend I actually did something about it. Spent Saturday morning with three tabs open, coffee going cold, trying to figure out where 200-plus feeds and a decade of folder organization should live next.
The contenders
Feedly is the one everyone's already pointing you toward, and for good reason, it's the least broken option right now. It's got a Chrome extension that slurps your Reader subscriptions in about ten seconds flat, which honestly impressed me. But I have to say it: the default "cards" view, all big thumbnails and magazine tiles, is not for me. I don't want my RSS feed to look like Pinterest. I want text. I want to scan forty headlines in the time it takes a card view to load six images. Thankfully there's a list view buried in the settings and once I switched to that it started feeling like something I could actually live in.
The Old Reader is the scrappy one. It looks like Reader circa 2010, and I mean that as a compliment, no cards, no cover flow nonsense, just a clean list and keyboard shortcuts that map almost exactly onto what my hands already know. Problem is they got absolutely flooded with signups after the Reader news broke, and when I tried to import my OPML file Saturday I sat in a queue for something like 40 minutes before it processed. Two guys running this out of what I assume is a spare bedroom, suddenly fielding the traffic of a service Google used to run. I don't envy them right now.
NewsBlur is the one I keep hearing power users swear by, and it does intelligence trainer stuff, dimming and highlighting stories based on what you've read before, which is neat but also more than I wanted to configure at 9am on a Saturday. It's $12 a year for premium (free tier caps you at 12 feeds, which is useless if you're the kind of person with 200 feeds, so premium is really the only option worth considering). The founder's also apparently been personally scaling servers by hand because of the surge. Respect, honestly.
What I landed on
I'm running Feedly for now, in list view, with the extension quietly logging into my Google account and pulling fresh subscriptions in the background. Not because it's the best experience of the three but because it's the one that didn't choke under load this particular weekend. I reserve the right to bail on it in June if something better shakes out. Digg's apparently building their own reader too, saw that mentioned a few weeks back, though there's nothing to actually use yet.
A few things I'd tell past-me, or anyone who still hasn't migrated:
- Export your OPML now, from Reader's settings, don't wait until June assuming you'll get to it. Takes thirty seconds.
- Test the keyboard shortcuts in whatever you pick before committing. I use j/k to move through items dozens of times a day without thinking about it, and losing that would genuinely slow me down more than losing the service itself.
- Don't trust "unread count" syncing across devices during this transition period, mine was showing wildly different numbers on my phone versus laptop for about a day after import.
Honestly the bigger loss here isn't the software, it's that Reader was the last place on the internet where "sharing" meant a small, curated group of people I actually followed reading the same stuff I did, and their comments would show up right there in the sidebar. Google+ sharing never replaced that for me and I don't think anything's going to. That's the part nobody's built a replacement for yet, and I'm not holding my breath that anyone will.
Ninety days left on the clock. If you're still sitting on this like I was, go export your feeds tonight.