So today marks exactly one month until Google Reader dies. July 1st is the date Google picked back in March when they announced they were killing it, and I've been putting off dealing with it the way you put off a dentist appointment, but a month feels like the point where "I should probably do something about this" turns into "okay actually do the thing."
I've used Reader since 2006. Every morning, coffee first, then Reader, usually around 6:30am before anyone else in the house is up. Something like 140 feeds in there at this point, a mess of folders I never cleaned up, half of them blogs that stopped posting years ago and I never bothered to prune. That's the real cost of switching here isn't it. It's not the reading, its the seven years of organizational cruft you have to decide whether to drag along or finally let die.
What I actually tried
Feedly was the obvious first stop since everyone's been talking about it. They built a "Reader importer" that logs into your Google account and pulls your whole OPML structure over in about ten seconds, folders and all, no manual export/import dance required. I was skeptical because I used their app a year ago and it felt sluggish on my phone, lots of jank scrolling through image-heavy feeds. It's noticeably better now. Not perfect, there's still a weird delay when you star an item, like a quarter second lag before the star actually fills in, but livable. I've been using it for about a week now as my daily driver and havent gone back to Reader once, which surprised me.
I also poked at NewsBlur for an afternoon. Samuel Clay, the guy who runs it basically solo, has apparently been scrambling to keep the servers up because everyone doing this same migration all decided to hit his one-man operation at once. Respect for that, honestly, but the interface has a learning curve I didn't feel like climbing this week. Three-pane view, unread counts behaving differently than I expected. Maybe I come back to it later.
The Old Reader is the other name that keeps coming up, and it's got that satisfying old-Google-Reader nostalgia layout, but it's also been overwhelmed since March when the shutdown news first broke and new signups have been capped or waitlisted depending on the day. I got in fine but a friend of mine didn't and gave up after twenty minutes of trying.
Digg is apparently building their own reader too, which they've said is coming "this summer" — no firm date yet as of today, so that's not an option right now, just something to keep an eye on. I'll believe it when I can log in.
The part nobody talks about
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not really about any of these apps individually. It's that RSS readers used to be a category with real competition and interesting differentiation, and Google strolling in with a free bundled product in 2005 basically flattened that whole market for eight years. Now that they're leaving, everyone's scrambling to rebuild what used to exist, except this time they need actual business models because there's no ad-supported Google mothership subsidizing it. Feedly hasn't said how they'll make money yet. That worries me a little, not gonna lie. I don't want to do this migration twice in a year.
Anyway, if you're also procrastinating on this: export your OPML now, today, even if you haven't picked a replacement. Reader lets you download it from the settings page in under a minute, and having that file sitting on your desktop makes the actual switch feel a lot less daunty than staring down a countdown clock. I did mine in about ninety seconds this morning and instantly felt less anxious about the whole thing.
One month. Set a reminder if you need one — I just did.