So I finally did it. After probably six weeks of complaining about it out loud to nobody in particular, I moved all my RSS feeds over to Feedly this weekend. Google Reader dies on July 1st, which if you're counting (I have been, mostly against my will) is a little over a month away. There's actually a banner across the top of Reader now with a little countdown, like it's a going-out-of-business sale at a mattress store. "34 days left." Thanks, Google. Real subtle.
I know, I know. Everybody and their cousin wrote this exact post back in March when Google first announced they were killing it. I didn't write it then because I was in denial. I kept telling myself something would change, that enough noise would make them reconsider, the way people convinced themselves Netflix would walk back Qwikster. It didn't happen with Reader either. So here we are.
Feedly's actually fine, for what it's worth. The import took maybe four minutes for all 180-something feeds I had piled up over the years, half of which I never read and just keep around out of some weird digital hoarding instinct. The keyboard shortcuts aren't identical to Reader's though, and that's been the single most annoying part of this whole transition. I've spent a decade with "j" and "k" wired into my hands for next/previous, and now I keep mashing the wrong keys and marking things read that I hadn't actually read. Small complaint, I realize, in the grand scheme of things, but it's the kind of muscle-memory thing that makes a tool feel like yours, and losing it stings more than it should.
Feedly says they picked up something like three million new users in the 48 hours after the Reader announcement back in March, which tells you how many of us were basically squatting in Reader out of pure inertia rather than any deep affection for it. I don't think I'm being nostalgic when I say Reader was good software though. It did one thing. It did it fast. There wasn't a single unnecessary animation in it. Compare that to some of the alternatives I tried this month, a couple of which insist on giving you a magazine-style card layout whether you want it or not, and Reader starts looking like a small miracle of restraint.
Anyway, not everything this week has been about mourning a dead RSS reader. I caved and signed up for Google Play Music All Access after seeing it demoed at I/O a couple weeks back, and I've been running it in the background pretty much nonstop since. Seven ninety-nine a month if you sign up before the end of June, nine ninety-nine after that, and for that price it's basically replaced the three or four playlists I used to keep synced onto my phone manually like some kind of caveman. The radio-station feature, where you seed it off one song and it just keeps going, has been surprisingly decent about not repeating itself. I was expecting it to loop back to the same fifteen songs within an hour the way Pandora sometimes does. Hasn't happened yet.
I also want to say something about the Xbox reveal from last week, but honestly I don't have much to add that a hundred other blogs haven't already said louder. The always-online talk has people rattled, understandably, and I get why. My internet at home drops for a few seconds probably twice a week, nothing dramatic, just enough that if my game console needed a live connection to function I'd be irritated fairly often. We'll know more in June when they actually show games instead of a box.
For now it's just me and a half-migrated RSS reader and a Spotify competitor I didn't think I needed. Thirty-four days on the countdown clock, and I still haven't figured out what to do with the star folder full of stuff I saved in Reader "for later" going back to like 2011. Later never really came, did it.