So Digg Reader showed up yesterday. Public launch, no more begging for an invite, just go sign in with your Digg account (or make one, which takes about ninety seconds) and there it is. I've had it open in a tab since about 9am this morning, which is roughly when I usually catch up on feeds with my coffee, and I have some early thoughts.
First, the obvious context in case anyone reading this has somehow missed it: Google Reader dies on Monday. July 1st. Four days from today. I've known this was coming since March and I still haven't fully made peace with it, which says more about me than about Google I guess. I built a genuinely dumb amount of my daily routine around that thing for something like six years and losing it feels less like losing a tool and more like losing a habit, if that makes sense.
I already moved most of my subscriptions over to Feedly a few weeks back, mostly because everyone else was doing it and I didn't want to be scrambling on June 30th trying to export an OPML file while their servers get hammered by a million other procrastinators doing the same thing at the last minute. Feedly's fine. It's fine! It does the job. But it's also got this glossy magazine-tile thing going on by default that I don't love, and switching it to list view every single time I open a new device is the kind of tiny friction that shouldn't bother me as much as it does.
Digg Reader is the opposite. It's plain. It's a list. It looks like Reader, honestly, which either means the Digg team was paying attention or means they just didn't have time to get fancy before shipping, and either way I'm grateful. Import was painless, I dropped in the same OPML export I'd already used for Feedly and every feed showed up with unread counts intact within a minute or two. j and k still move you up and down the list. That alone got a small "oh thank god" out of me, because I did not want to relearn keyboard shortcuts for the third time this year.
What it doesn't have yet, as far as I can tell after a day of poking around, is folders. Or tagging. Or anything resembling the organizational structure I'd built up over years of sorting feeds into categories I definitely don't remember the logic behind anymore (why did I ever make a folder called "maybe" — no idea, past me, no idea). Everything's just one long river right now. For some people that's a feature. For me, someone who has forty-plus feeds and likes to triage by topic depending on my mood, it's a problem, at least today.
Here's my actual complaint, the one that's less about either product and more about the whole situation: I resent that I have to care about this at all. I didn't ask for my reading habits to become a research project. A tool I liked got killed off because it wasn't a growth business inside a company that measures everything in growth businesses, and now I get to spend a week of my life auditioning replacements like I'm hiring for a job nobody wanted to post. Feedly, Digg Reader, I've also poked at The Old Reader and NewsBlur over the past month. None of them are bad. That's almost worse somehow — if one of them were obviously terrible I could just pick the best of the rest and move on. Instead it's four decent options and a nagging feeling I'm going to end up switching again in three months once the dust settles and one of them pulls ahead.
For right now I think I'm keeping both Feedly and Digg Reader open for the next week or two and just seeing which one I reach for without thinking about it. That's usually the real test, not feature lists. Whichever app I open on reflex when I'm bored on the train is probably the one that's going to stick.
If you're one of the people who hasn't exported your Google Reader data yet, seriously, do it this weekend. Google Takeout, five minutes, don't be the person hitting refresh on a dead URL Monday morning.