Twelve days. That's how long it's been since reader.google.com started redirecting to that farewell page instead of showing me my unread count, and I'm not going to pretend I've made peace with it yet.
I know, everybody and their cousin wrote a "goodbye Google Reader" post back on July 1st, and I skipped it on purpose, because there's nothing worse than sixty blogs all posting the same eulogy on the same day. But now that the initial panic's worn off and I've actually had to live with a replacement for a couple of weeks, I think there's something more useful to write than "RIP Reader, you will be missed."
So here's the actual verdict, from someone who had somewhere around 340 subscriptions and genuinely used shared items to send stuff to a friend of mine pretty much every day for four years.
I tried Feedly first, mostly because everyone else did, and the panic-migration numbers were kind of insane (they were bragging about millions of new signups within days of the shutdown announcement back in March). The import from Reader was painless, folders and all, took maybe ninety seconds. But the interface still feels like it's trying to be a magazine when I just want a list. I don't want cards. I don't want a "Today" view with big thumbnails. I want the thing I had for six years: title, source, unread count, next item.
So then I switched to Digg Reader, which launched right at the end of June, just before Reader actually died. It's closer to what I want, plain list, keyboard shortcuts that mostly work, j and k move you down and up like they should. But it dropped about a dozen of my feeds during import and I had to go re-add them by hand, which is exactly the kind of small annoying thing that makes you resent a whole migration even when the big stuff went fine.
Neither one has sharing that works the way Reader's did. That's the part nobody mentions when they write these posts. It wasn't really about reading the feeds for me, it was the little green "shared" button, and the fact that my friend Priya and I had basically been running a two-person link blog inside Reader since 2009. Now I just text her links like an animal.
Unrelated tangent, but Thursday, Microsoft announced it's reorganizing basically the entire company. Ballmer sent around this long memo about moving away from the old setup, where Windows, Office, and Xbox each ran their own little fiefdom, toward functional groups organized around engineering, marketing, and business development for the whole company at once. Julie Larson-Green is apparently taking over hardware across the board. I don't understand internal Microsoft politics well enough to say whether this actually fixes anything, but I've read enough of these corporate reorg memos over the years to know the real test isn't the memo itself, it's whether anyone below VP level can tell you what changed six months from now. Usually they can't.
Anyway, back to feeds. I still have the little Reader icon bookmarked in my browser toolbar out of pure muscle memory, and I click it about once a day before I remember it just 404s now. It's a dumb small habit, but it's the kind of thing that tells you a tool was actually part of your routine and not just some app you opened sometimes.
If you're still shopping around for a replacement, my honest advice is pick whichever one has the better keyboard shortcuts and just accept you're going to lose the social layer entirely. Nobody's rebuilt that part yet and I don't think anyone's going to bother. RSS reading in July of 2013 is apparently a solitary activity again, same as it probably always should have been, according to the three people I know who never used Reader's sharing feature at all and think I'm strange for missing it this much.