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Two Weeks Without Google Reader

Two Weeks Without Google Reader

· 4 min read
Tutorials digg reader feedly google-reader rss tools

Two Weeks Without Google Reader: Where I Actually Landed

So its been about two weeks since Google Reader actually died (July 1st came and went, and yeah, I still instinctively type reader.google.com into the address bar some mornings out of pure muscle memory). I wrote back in March when they first announced the shutdown that I wasnt going to panic about it, and I mostly kept that promise, but I did spend an embarrassing number of evenings this month bouncing between replacement services instead of just picking one and moving on with my life. Figured Id write up what I actually settled on, since half the emails Ive gotten this month have been "so what did you end up using."

Short version: Im on Feedly now, with Digg Reader open in a second tab that I check maybe once a day out of stubbornness.

The contenders

I tried four things seriously, not just poked at for five minutes:

  • Feedly - already had this installed as a Chrome extension before Reader even shut down, so my OPML import happened automatically back in March. Zero friction.
  • Digg Reader - launched a few weeks back, and I wanted to like it more than I do. Its fast and the interface is clean in a very "we know exactly what Reader looked like" way, but its missing folder management that isnt just a flat list, and thats a dealbreaker for me since I've got like 40 feeds sorted into six categories.
  • The Old Reader - this one basically imploded under its own popularity right after the Reader announcement back in March, capacity issues, signup waitlists, the works. Its stabilized since then but it still feels a little fragile to me, like Im borrowing someones side project (which, to be fair, it kind of is).
  • NewsBlur - the one with the actual dollar cost, $24 a year for the premium tier if you want more than 12 feeds unlocked. Samuel Clay (the guy who runs it) has been posting these wild transparency updates about server load during the Reader migration crunch, which I respect, but the reading interface just isnt for me. Too much going on visually.

Why Feedly won

Mostly it came down to nothing, honestly. Not "it does something amazing the others dont," just that it worked on day one without me having to think about it, the keyboard shortcuts are close enough to old Reader that my hands already knew what to do (j and k still move you down and up through the list, thank god), and the mobile app doesnt feel like an afterthought. I check it on my phone way more than I ever checked Reader on a browser, which says something about where reading habits have actually moved, I guess.

The thing nobody talks about with Feedly is that its running on their own backend now, not scraping Google Reader under the hood like a lot of these tools were doing back when it was announced in March. So this past week has actually been the real first stress test, not the fake one everybody did in advance. So far, fine. No missed posts that I can tell, though Im not exactly auditing every feed line by line to be sure.

One complaint, and its a small one: Feedly really wants you to use their "magazine" and "cards" view modes, and I had to dig two menus deep just to get back to a plain list. I dont need my RSS reader to look like a Pinterest board. Give me text, give me a scrollbar, let me move on with my morning coffee.

What I'd actually tell you to do

If youre still floating around without a reader two weeks in, dont overthink it the way I did. Install Feedly, import your OPML (Google gave everyone an export tool through Takeout before the lights went out, so hopefully you grabbed yours back before July 1st), and just use it for a week before you go shopping for alternatives. The muscle memory thing is real - the app that costs you the least friction on day one is probably going to win regardless of which one has the marginally better feature set on paper.

Also, slightly unrelated, but Nokia had that event in New York last week for the Lumia 1020, the one with the ridiculous 41-megapixel camera bump sticking off the back of the phone. I have zero interest in switching to Windows Phone but I kind of want to hold that thing just to see what a phone with a camera sensor that big even feels like in your hand. Anyway. Back to RSS feeds and pretending its still 2011 in here.