Twenty-nine days. That's how long Google Reader has left, assuming Google doesn't push the date again (they won't, they never do), and I've spent way too much of my Sunday morning tabbing between reader alternatives instead of actually reading anything in them.
I've used Reader every single morning since some year I honestly can't pin down anymore, 2007 or 2008 probably. Coffee, the couch, phone in one hand, 228 feeds scrolling past while I decide which six or seven things are worth clicking into. It's a routine. Losing it in a month feels dumber than it should, but here we are.
So the last couple of weeks I've been auditioning replacements like I'm casting a play nobody asked for.
Feedly is the obvious front-runner and I get why. They had their whole migration tool ready within days of Google's shutdown announcement back in March, which is either impressively fast or a little suspicious depending on how paranoid you are about a startup building its entire growth strategy on a competitor's death. The app itself is fine. Fine isn't exciting though. The default card-based magazine layout makes my feeds look like a Pinterest board and I hate it, so I switched to the plain list view about four minutes in and haven't looked back since.
NewsBlur I like more than I expected to. It's basically a one-person operation, and the guy who runs it has spent all spring personally answering support tickets and replying to complaints on Twitter, which is either charming or a little terrifying depending on the day. There's a training feature where it learns what you tend to skip and starts hiding similar stuff automatically. Neat idea. I'm not sure I trust it with my judgment yet.
The Old Reader got so hammered by new signups back in March that it just stopped letting people register for a while. It's open again now but it still has that scrappy, half-finished feel, like a group project where one person did all the work and everyone else just showed up for the presentation.
Digg Reader doesn't exist yet, for the record. The team building it said back in April they'd have something ready before July 1st, and as of this morning there's still nothing you can actually use. I want to believe them. I've also wanted to believe a lot of things.
Here's my real complaint, the one that's been bugging me most out of all of this: Reeder. Reeder is, hands down, the best reading app on iOS and on the Mac, and it does exactly one thing, which is talk to Google Reader's API. That's it. No Feedly support, no NewsBlur support, nothing. The developer has said an update is coming, but "coming" is doing a lot of work in that sentence with four weeks left on the clock. I paid for that app twice, once on my phone and once on my Mac, and in about a month it might just stop working. That's a genuinely bad feeling for a $2.99 app I open every single day without thinking about it.
Anyway. I'm leaning Feedly for the actual feed hosting, mostly because everyone else seems to be landing there too, and I'd rather whatever ends up replacing Reeder on my phone have somewhere popular to plug into. Doesn't mean I have to love the web interface while I wait.
In completely unrelated news, WWDC is a week and a half out now, June 10th, and I've already resigned myself to another summer of rumors about a flatter, more colorful iOS turning out to be true. The invite just says something about "the future of iOS and OS X," which is the kind of sentence Apple writes when it knows exactly what's in the box and wants you to lose your mind guessing anyway. Tickets sold out in under two minutes back in April, so I won't be there in person. I'll be watching the stream like everyone else, coffee in hand, probably reading the liveblogs in whatever's left of my RSS reader by then.