So I did the math this morning and it's 26 days. Twenty-six days until Google Reader actually goes dark, July 1st, and I still don't have a real plan. I've known this was coming since March. I wrote it on a sticky note on my monitor back then ("figure out RSS thing"), and the sticky note is still there, slightly more yellow, completely ignored.
I've been using Reader since maybe 2007. I just checked my subscriptions before writing this and I've got 341 feeds in there, which is honestly more than I actually read, but that's not the point. Some of those are dead blogs that haven't posted since 2010 and I keep them anyway out of some weird loyalty. There's a photography blog from a guy in Portland who stopped posting in January 2011 and I still haven't unsubscribed. I don't know what that says about me.
Anyway. Everyone's been telling me to just move to Feedly, so I finally did it last night. The import was painless, I'll give them that: you authorize it, it pulls your whole Reader library over in about ten seconds, folders and all. The interface is nicer than Reader's too, if I'm honest, less gray, more magazine-ish. But it's still running on the Google Reader API underneath for now (they're calling their backend replacement project "Normandy," which is a weirdly dramatic name for an RSS server), so I keep wondering what happens on July 1st when the thing it's quietly depending on just isn't there anymore. They say they'll have it ready. I believe them, mostly. But "mostly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
A coworker of mine swears by NewsBlur instead, the one where you can train it to bury certain topics on a per-feed basis, which sounds neat but also costs $24 a year for anything above the free tier's 64-feed limit. I've got 341 feeds. That math doesn't work for me, so it's Feedly for now, or maybe I try both for a week and see which one I don't resent using.
Here's my actual complaint, though, the one nobody seems to be writing about. It's not really about which app replaces Reader. It's that RSS itself has been quietly dying for a couple of years and this is just the part where somebody finally says it out loud. Half the people I used to swap feed URLs with in 2009 don't use a reader at all anymore. They just get everything from Twitter now, whatever gets retweeted into their timeline, and they seem completely fine with it. I'm not fine with it. Twitter is not a substitute for choosing, deliberately, forty blogs you actually care about and reading them in order. Twitter is what's loud that hour. Those are different things and I don't think enough people care that they're different.
This blog started back in November 2011 and I want to say RSS already felt a little old-fashioned even then, at least among people I knew in person. Nobody wanted to talk about feed readers at parties. But it's still, to me, the only sane way to keep up with a few hundred sources without losing my mind, and I resent that the company that made the best version of that tool is killing it because usage had been declining, or so their own blog post from March put it, and they wanted to focus resources elsewhere. Fine. It's their product. I just wish "focus resources elsewhere" didn't always seem to mean "toward Google+."
E3 is next week, by the way, starting Monday, and normally I'd be writing about that instead, rumors about what Sony and Microsoft are going to do to each other on stage, but I've got 26 days on the clock and a sticky note mocking me, so that's what's actually occupying my brain space this week. I'll pick an RSS reader eventually. Probably this weekend. Probably Feedly, if I'm being honest with myself, because switching things twice is more annoying than switching once and being slightly unhappy about it.
If anyone reading this has actually made the jump already and has opinions, my email's on the About page. I'd rather hear from an actual person than read another "top 5 Google Reader alternatives" listicle, of which there are now approximately four thousand.