So it's been about three and a half weeks since Google dropped the Reader bomb, and I think I've finally landed somewhere I'm happy with. If you missed it (you didn't, everybody's been talking about it), Google announced on March 13th that Reader is getting killed off on July 1st. Not "deprecated eventually," not "folded into some other product nobody asked for." Dead. A specific date. Ninety-ish days from the day I'm typing this.
I want to talk about what actually happened after, not the announcement itself, because I feel like every blog on the internet already did the "how dare they" post in the first 48 hours and I'm frankly tired of reading those. What's more interesting to me is watching the scramble in real time.
Feedly was the first place everyone ran. Within about a week of the announcement they said they'd added something like three million new users, and you could feel it: the service got noticeably slower for a few days there, page loads that used to be instant were taking a couple seconds. They also announced this project called Normandy, which is basically them building a Google Reader-compatible API on their own backend so that all the third-party apps that depend on Reader (Reeder, Press, whatever you use on your phone) don't just stop working on July 1st. Smart move, honestly. I don't think people fully appreciate how much of the RSS ecosystem is just... built on top of Google's plumbing. Kill the plumbing and half the apps in the App Store stop functioning overnight.
I tried Feedly for about a week and a half. Didn't love it. The card-based view with the big thumbnails feels like it's trying too hard to be magazine-y when honestly I just want a list of headlines I can scan in ninety seconds with my coffee. Maybe that's just me being set in my ways after using Reader's plain list view for, what, six or seven years now.
Where I landed instead was NewsBlur, which I'd honestly never heard of before all this. It's a one-guy operation, or close to it, Samuel Clay built the thing more or less solo, and he posted a pretty candid blog update a couple weeks back saying the sudden flood of Reader refugees had basically melted his servers and he was rolling out a paid tier to keep the lights on. $24 a year for premium. I paid it within about five minutes of reading that post, partly because the free tier was already showing me delays and partly because I like the idea of money going to an actual person keeping a small independent service alive instead of into whatever black hole ad revenue disappears into at Google. That's maybe a small thing but it mattered to me.
The interface took some getting used to. NewsBlur does this "train your reader" thing with thumbs up and down on stories to tune what gets highlighted, which I ignored for the first few days and now sort of appreciate, though I'll admit half the time I forget it's even there.
Digg's also apparently building something — they put up a post saying they're working on a reader replacement and aiming to have it out before the July cutoff. I have zero information about what that'll actually look like yet, so I'm not going to speculate, but it's worth keeping an eye on given Digg's history of either nailing a redesign or completely faceplanting one, no in-between.
Anyway. My OPML file is imported, my subscriptions are synced, and I've got about eleven weeks left before the old thing just stops existing. It's a weird feeling, watching a countdown clock on a piece of software you've had open in a browser tab every single day since 2006 or so. I know it's "just an RSS reader" and there are objectively fine alternatives now. But there's something a little sad about a good, simple tool getting shut down not because it broke or got beaten by better competition, just because it didn't move the needle on whatever internal metrics Google cares about this quarter. That's the part that still bugs me more than the inconvenience of switching.
If you're still on the fence about where to land, my honest advice is just pick one and commit for a couple weeks before judging it. Every RSS reader feels wrong for the first three days no matter which one you pick.