One week ago today Google Reader actually died. Not "deprecated," not "sunset," just gone — the URL redirects to a sad little Google page now and thats that. Ive had a full week to sit with it and I think Im finally ready to talk about where I landed, because for the first few days I was basically feed-less and it was worse than I expected.
I know, I know. Everyone and their cousin wrote a eulogy for Reader back in March when Google first announced this, and Ive read enough "in memoriam" posts to last me a lifetime. Im not doing that here. What I want to talk about is the actually annoying part: the week of trying three different replacements while your unread count silently balloons into the thousands and you start wondering if you even need an RSS reader at all.
Feedly first, because everyone said so
Feedly was the obvious first stop since theyd been begging Reader refugees to switch since the announcement, and they claim to have picked up something like 3 million new users in the days around the shutdown. The import from Google worked fine on June 30th, no complaints there. But the actual reading experience bugged me. Feedly really wants you to use its "magazine" and "cards" views, all big thumbnails and pull quotes, and I just want a list I can blast through with j and k like it's 2009. You can switch to a "titles only" view buried in the settings, which helps, but it still doesn't feel like Reader, it feels like Reader wearing a Pinterest costume.
Then I tried NewsBlur, which I actually kind of loved
Samuel Clay (he's the one guy who built and runs NewsBlur, which I think is wild for a service handling this much traffic right now) was posting on Twitter about servers falling over from the sudden crush of signups, and to his credit the site mostly held up when I actually used it. The training feature, where it learns which stories in a feed youre likely to want based on ones you starred before, sounds gimmicky but I noticed it quietly hiding a bunch of noise from a couple of high-volume feeds I follow. Free tier caps you at 64 feeds though, and I've got 138 subscriptions (yes I counted, don't judge me), so it's either pay the $24 a year or trim my list, and I'm stubborn enough that Im currently paying.
I also poked at Digg Reader, which just came out of beta a couple weeks back. It's clean and fast and does basically nothing else, no starring workflow to speak of yet, no search. Feels like a v0.5. I'll check back in a month.
The part nobody warns you about
The thing that actually got me wasn't picking a new reader, it was realizing how much of my daily routine was built around Reader specifically. I read feeds on the train, star things with a keyboard shortcut, then go back later on my laptop and the stars are all there waiting. That sync-everywhere thing felt invisible until it broke. My first two days post-shutdown I just... didn't read any blogs. Not because I couldn't, but because opening a new unfamiliar interface felt like homework, so I didn't bother. Old habits are a hell of a drug.
Small aside: I also found out the hard way that not every blog I follow even has a working feed anymore. At least four in my OPML file 404'd on import, dead blogs nobody bothered to redirect. Little digital graveyard tucked inside my subscription list that I never would have noticed if Reader hadn't forced the issue.
Where I've landed, for now: NewsBlur on the phone and in the browser, Feedly's Chrome extension kept around because it's genuinely nice for quickly scanning headlines between meetings. Not married to either. Ask me again in a month and I might be somewhere else entirely, because if this week taught me anything it's that none of these are quite it yet, they're just the least-bad options currently available. Reader set a bar in like 2007 that apparently nobody's bothered clearing since.
If you're still sitting on an un-imported OPML file from Reader, seriously, go export it now if you somehow haven't. Google's said the actual data disappears completely pretty soon, and unlike the last seven years, there's no undo button on this one.