OT: Google Reader Kaput July 1, Recommended Alternatives?

Submitted by Hardware Sushi on

If you use Google Reader, you likely saw a message today indicating it will no longer be available after July 1.

This sucks big time, I probably follow 100 different blogs, tumblrs, subreddits, etc. in 10-12 folders. Obviously, my Michigan folder will be a sadly missed daily routine.

Does anyone else out there have any recommended alternatives to Google Reader? I'd like to move my feeds over before it's too late and I'm scrambling to remember them all.

Here's the first article that comes up about it. The article says Feedly. Any thoughts on that or other services?

Clinton Wu

March 14th, 2013 at 2:10 AM ^

If you're looking for an alternative to skim headlines, please give Skim.Me (http://skim.me) a shot. We're a startup releasing soon to help you keep up at a glance. 

 
Don't pay attention to the picture on the splash page. We're redesigning our skimmer from tiles to a list/stream of info (like Reader) but with an updated design. 

joeyb

March 14th, 2013 at 10:35 AM ^

I stopped using Google Reader a while ago, not because I didn't like it, but because I was spending too much time in it and I didn't need to read every story posted various websites. However, I was still pretty upset when I read that they were killing it, but I couldn't quite figure out why until someone pointed out why they had the same feelings about it.

The only way that the cloud works is if the user feels comfortable that the app and data are going to be available to them in the future. I use all Google apps for a few reasons, but the main one is that I know they are going to be around in the future. This decision shakes that foundation of trust. Google may be around in the future, but what's to say that they won't decide to axe Google Docs/Drive or Google Music in the future. I can't imagine that they'd allow gmail to ever go away, but can you imagine how painful it would be if they did?

What makes this worse is that they have no competitor that does what they do, so now, all of their users have to settle for either a current competitor that is inferior in many ways, or try out new competitors that pop up in the next few months but that are unproven.

Frustration, frustration, frustration.

French West Indian

March 14th, 2013 at 11:00 AM ^

...but I'd be careful about assuming that google will be around forever.  I'm even a bit skeptical of internet.  This suff isn't carved in stone, it's floating around on servers and if the plug ever gets pulled...well, poof!

wile_e8

March 14th, 2013 at 11:16 AM ^

This seems like a terrible long-term move for Google. They just alienated a large number of techies that they would normally count on to be the early adopters to any new web services they might launch. Now instead of quickly adopting potentially useful Google services, people that lost Google Reader are going to be reluctant to buy into any service that might disappear during the next spring cleaning if it becomes inconvenient for Google.