So its been four days now. Four days since Google Reader actually, finally, for real shut off the lights, and I keep opening a new tab and typing "google.com/reader" out of pure muscle memory before I catch myself. Old habits are stupid like that. I did it twice this morning before my coffee had even kicked in.
I know, I know, everybody and their cousin wrote about this back in March when Google first announced they were killing it off. That was the big dramatic announcement, the "how could they do this to us" phase. This isn't that post. This is the "okay its actually dead now, what do I do with my life" post, four days into the aftermath, and honestly the transition has been messier than I expected.
I'd been putting off picking a replacement for months because I figured I had time. Then July 1st hit and suddenly I had zero time, an inbox full of half-read tech blogs, and about 340 subscriptions that needed a new home immediately. I ended up on Feedly, mostly because it was the one everyone in my Twitter feed kept recommending and because it lets you import your Reader subscriptions with basically one click through their little migration tool. Credit where its due, that part worked fine.
What hasnt been fine: the keyboard shortcuts. I lived in Reader with j and k, marking things read as I scrolled, and Feedly's shortcuts are close enough to be familiar but different enough that I keep fat-fingering the wrong key and accidentally starring an article about enterprise SaaS pricing that I could not possibly care less about. Small complaint, I know, but when youve built a decade of muscle memory around one tool, "close enough" is somehow more annoying than "completely different."
I also tried Digg Reader for about twenty minutes on Tuesday. They pushed their beta out just days before the Reader shutdown, clearly racing the clock, and you can tell — it feels unfinished in the way betas do, missing folders, missing a proper search, a UI that looks like a placeholder for a UI. I respect the hustle of getting something out the door in time but Im not switching my whole reading habit to it yet. Maybe in a few months once theyve had time to actually build it out.
Heres the thing that actually bugs me though, more than any specific feature gap: none of these replacements have Reader's social layer, and I didnt realize how much I used it until it was gone. I used to share stuff to a small group of maybe eight people who all had Reader accounts, we'd leave little comments on each others shares, it was basically a tiny private link-blog for our friend group. That whole ecosystem just evaporated on July 1st along with the RSS parsing. Feedly has a "board" feature you can use kind of like that but nobody I know has moved their sharing habits over yet, so right now its just me, alone, boarding articles into the void.
Im not going to pretend this is some huge tragedy — its a free RSS reader, there are worse problems to have in life. But I do think its worth saying, now that the initial announcement noise has died down and were actually living with the consequences: killing Reader didnt just remove a product, it broke a bunch of small social habits that had quietly built up around it over eight years. Feedly can copy the feed-parsing part just fine. Nobody's copied the part where my friend Dave used to leave dumb one-line jokes under everything I shared.
Anyway. 1,100 unread items in my new Feedly account as of this morning, which feels about right for four days of chaos. Ill report back once the dust settles on which reader I actually end up sticking with long term, assuming I dont just give up and go back to checking twelve bookmarked sites by hand like its 2004.