So the countdown is officially on. Google confirmed a while back that Reader dies July 1st, and I've been putting off dealing with it the way I put off everything mildly annoying, like renewing my car registration. But I sat down last night with a beer and actually did the migration, so here's what that looked like in case you're still stalling too.
Step one: get your data out. Go to Google Takeout (takeout.google.com if you've never used it) and export your Reader subscriptions. It spits out a subscriptions.xml OPML file with every feed you follow, plus your starred items and shared stuff if you're into that. Takes about ninety seconds. This part is painless and honestly kind of satisfying to watch happen.
Step two: pick where it goes. I tried three replacements over the last couple weeks — Feedly, NewsBlur, and The Old Reader — and I want to be clear about something before I recommend one: none of them feel like Reader yet. They're all still building out from "we cloned the basics" toward something that actually replaces eight years of muscle memory. Feedly has gotten a ton of press because they announced this whole "Normandy" backend project to cleanly take over for people the day Reader shuts off, and their user numbers reportedly jumped something like 500% in the days after the shutdown announcement back in March. Their app is polished, the keyboard shortcuts are close enough to Reader's that my hands didn't feel lost, and the OPML import just worked, no fiddling.
NewsBlur is the scrappier option and I kind of love it for that reason even though the interface is busier than I'd like. It's built by one guy, Samuel Clay, mostly solo, and you can tell: it's got this training feature where it learns which stories in a feed you actually care about versus which ones you always skip, which Reader never did. The free tier caps you at 64 feeds though, and I've got somewhere north of 200, so I ended up paying the $24/year for premium. Worth it. The Old Reader I bounced off of pretty fast, it's charming in a "this is literally just old Reader" way but it choked hard when a bunch of us tried to import at once a couple months ago and I never went back to check if that got fixed.
I ended up running Feedly on my phone and NewsBlur on the desktop for now, which is a dumb way to live but I haven't committed to just one yet. If you make me pick today I'd lean NewsBlur, mostly because I like giving money to a guy running his own service instead of feeding another free thing into some company's larger ecosystem, especially a Google product graveyard survivor like Feedly that could pull the same move in three years.
While I had Google tabs open anyway I poked around Play Music All Access, the streaming thing they announced at I/O last week alongside the new unified Hangouts messaging app. It's $9.99 a month, or $7.99 if you sign up before the end of June, and it slots your own uploaded MP3s in next to the streaming catalog, which is actually the part I like best, no weird split between "my library" and "the service's library" the way Spotify does it. I'm not switching off Rdio yet, I've got two years of playlists built up there, but I'll probably poke at the free trial before the intro price disappears.
Also, briefly, because I can't not mention it: Microsoft showed off the Xbox One on Tuesday and I have thoughts but they're mostly just "we still don't know the price or when it ships, so what exactly did we just watch." A living room box that wants to be your cable box and your Skype phone and your game console all at once is an interesting bet. I'm reserving judgment till E3 next month when presumably they'll tell us what it costs and whether Kinect being bundled in means the price is going to be brutal.
Anyway. If you're one of the people who's been ignoring the Reader thing, the OPML export takes two minutes and you'll feel better having it done. Don't be like me and wait till there's five weeks left on the clock.