So it's been a little over a month since Google Reader actually died. July 1st came and went, and I've now been living with whatever came after long enough to have real opinions instead of panic opinions. Figured I'd write those down before I forget how annoyed I was in March when Google first announced this whole mess.
Quick recap for anyone who managed to avoid the collective freakout: Google killed Reader, millions of us who actually used RSS (a smaller crowd than the tech press pretended, but a loud one) had to go find somewhere else to dump our feeds. I bounced around for about three weeks trying four different services before settling. Here's where I landed and why, in case it saves someone else the trouble.
Feedly won, but not for the reason everyone says
Everybody and their mother recommended Feedly the second Reader's shutdown was announced, and their user numbers apparently jumped by something like three million people in the days right after the news broke back in March. That's the reason you keep hearing about them. But honestly the thing that sold me wasn't the redesign or the cloud sync, it's that they built a Google Reader API-compatible layer so a bunch of third-party apps I already had on my phone (Press, Reeder once it updates) can just point at Feedly's servers instead of Google's with barely any config. That's the actual migration story, not the pretty magazine-tile view they push on the marketing page, which I turned off within about ten minutes because I don't want my tech news dressed up like a Pinterest board at 6am.
Digg Reader is fine. Just fine.
Digg (yes, that Digg, the one everyone wrote off years ago) quietly shipped their own reader at the end of June, right as the deadline was closing in. I gave it a real week. It's clean, it's fast, it does the job. But it launched without any offline reading and no real API for other apps to hook into yet, which for me is a dealbreaker since I do most of my actual reading on the subway with no signal. Maybe that gets fixed. I'm not holding my breath given Digg's track record of shipping something and then going quiet for six months.
The Old Reader is the one I actually recommend to people who miss 2007-era Reader
If what you actually loved about Google Reader was the barebones list view and the social sharing with a small group of friends — not the algorithmic feed stuff everyone's chasing now — go use The Old Reader. It's a small team, it occasionally falls over under load (mine hung for a solid two minutes just importing my OPML file), but it's the only one that felt like the thing I lost instead of a reinvention of it. I keep it as a backup account just in case Feedly ever pulls a Google on me, which, given how fast that market is moving right now, does not feel like a paranoid thing to plan for.
The actual lesson here
The bigger thing this whole mess taught me has nothing to do with any specific reader. It's that I'd been treating a free Google product like infrastructure for six years without ever exporting my OPML file once. Never backed it up, never even looked at where it lived. That's on me, not on Google. So step one if you're still floating around unsettled: export your OPML from wherever you are right now, today, and stash a copy somewhere that isn't tied to one company's roadmap. Took me four minutes and it should've been the first thing I did back in March instead of the last.
I'm not going to pretend this is a solved problem forever, either. Feedly's free and venture-backed and eventually has to make money somehow, and I have zero faith that whatever business model they land on won't annoy me eventually. But for right now, on a Monday in August, my feeds are syncing, my phone apps still work, and I've stopped thinking about it, which honestly is all I ever wanted out of an RSS reader in the first place.