So this is it. Monday morning Google Reader just stops existing, and I've spent basically this entire week in a weird low-grade panic about it, the kind where you keep opening a tab out of habit and then remembering, oh right, better fix that before it's actually gone. I've had the "export your data" nag banner sitting at the top of Reader for months and ignored it like a smoke detector chirping for a new battery. Not ignoring it anymore.
I follow something like 340 feeds. I know that sounds excessive and it kind of is, but a lot of them are dead blogs that post twice a year and I just never bothered pruning. The folder structure took me actual years to get right: Design, Dev, News, a folder just called "weird" that has like eleven blogs in it I can't even fully justify anymore. Losing that organization felt like a bigger deal than losing the app itself.
Digg Reader opened up to everyone on Wednesday, and I want to like it more than I do. Points for existing at all. Digg spent the last couple months teasing it in that coy "something is coming" way and then actually shipped before the deadline, which is more than I expected from a company whose last big cultural moment was getting eaten alive by Reddit. The import from Google worked fine, folders came across intact, unread counts matched up. That part I have no complaints about.
The problem is it just feels thin. No keyboard shortcuts yet, which sounds like a nitpick until you realize how much of Reader's whole appeal for people like me was mashing "j" for forty-five minutes straight through a backlog. There's no offline reading, no way to star an item in the "I want to actually save this forever" sense (their "Save for Later" is scoped weird and I don't fully trust it not to get wiped in some future redesign). The whole thing has that just-shipped feeling, like everyone on the team is still eating lunch at their desks and nobody's slept properly since May.
I ended up settling on Feedly instead, at least for now, and I say "for now" because I've learned my lesson about getting attached to any single reader ever again. Feedly's been building toward this for a year already with their "Normandy" backend project, basically preparing a parachute in case Google ever did exactly what it just did, so by the time the announcement actually landed in March they already had a real product instead of a hackathon demo. The transition took maybe four minutes. Chrome extension, mobile app, browser view that's a little too magaziney for my taste but you can switch it to a plain list, which is the only view I've ever wanted from an RSS reader honestly.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not about either of these apps. It's about doing this a second time. I lost Google Wave. I lost iGoogle is basically dead too even though it's not officially gone yet. And now this — the exact same shrug from Google, a blog post nobody asked for, and a bunch of us scrambling to rebuild years of curation somewhere else, with zero guarantee the new place sticks around either. Feedly's free right now. Cool. So was Reader.
If you're one of the three people who still emails me instead of just tweeting at me (you know who you are, and I appreciate you), and you're reading this on your lunch break wondering if you still have time — you do, technically, but don't wait for Sunday night like I almost did. Go to Google Takeout, export the Reader data, grab the OPML file, and get it into whatever you pick before Monday. Feedly has a one-click Reader import that handles the whole thing without you touching Takeout at all, which is honestly the easiest migration of any service I've ever moved off of.
Anyway. RIP to the little orange RSS icon showing up in my browser toolbar for the last time this weekend. It was a good run. I'm mostly just annoyed I have to relearn where all my keyboard shortcuts live again for a service I'll probably complain about by September.