Google Reader kept the content of RSS feeds cached forever, meaning it was the last surviving record of a huge number of dead and deleted blogs. The Archive Team have spent the last month or so fetching those blogs out of Reader to serve as a permanent archive. They posted a few days ago on HN asking for some last minute help, and managed to archive 46.23M feeds.<p>Check out their efforts here: <a href="http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader" rel="nofollow">http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader</a>
"... we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience."<p>Yeah, Reader held back the development of the robot car, glasses, floating balloon internet and the brazilian social site...
BREAKING: In a surprise belated April Fool's joke, Google revives Reader, according to former CEO Eric Schmidt, "just to fuck with everyone who spent money developing a shitty alternative."
For me, this was a good move.<p>It inspired me to finally look past Google for the web based services I use daily (search, mail, rss, analytics, calendar, video hosting etc). Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Putting all of my eggs in their basket seems like horrible idea. I've now come quite far in my exodus. Yesterday I found <a href="https://www.startpage.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.startpage.com/</a> (uses Google) which gives good results (roughly same as Swedish Google but not filter bubbled). DDG (uses different sources, but seems to weight Bing) is downright terrible when not using English as search language.
It'll be less important now than it was 3-6 years ago, but get ready for all those FeedBurner subscriber count widgets to show huge subscriber # crashes as Reader no longer checks in.<p>Back in the day, they were a sort of informal auditing system and definitely helped me land advertisers for my blog (simply because I could "prove" I had 20,000 readers or whatever).<p>Thankfully I ditched the Web and moved to e-mail and know exactly how many subscribers I had, but this was certainly more luck and not any great piece of foresight on my part ;-)
I use The Old Reade, which I can use exactly like Google Reader, with the exception that k does not always skip to the next article; if you're reading an article it skips to the top of that. Same strange behavior as Google Reader is that while the number of unread posts is correct, the content of your feed is not up-to-date, so you first have to click on the result number, then it is updated.<p>Apart from that, it's really nice. I never used any social features of the Reader, just the aggregation. That's why I couldn't care less if they implement RSS support or a recommendation engine in G+.
I wish there was a decent alternative out there. They all seem to be a bit unpolished.<p>The most polished alternative I've seen is Feedly. I wrote to the founder about this many moons ago explaining that in trying to be 'innovative' with the UI, for me the whole user experience detracts so badly from the functionality I want from the app that I don't want to use it.<p>Where is the alternative, with the polish, without the 'innovation'. Perhaps I should build one...<p>I'll get my coat.
RIP Reader. For those looking for a replacement, especially those with an Android phone, check out Newsblur. It's all open source, the developer is accessible, and most importantly it works insanely well. I honestly like it better than Reader.
I've been using Google Alerts via RSS for years now, primarily consuming the alerts by way of Reader, but more recently Feedly.<p>One thing I didn't expect was to have Alerts drop RSS support coinciding with Reader's death. However, today in Feedly I'm staring at a wall of "Google Alerts no longer supports RSS delivery" items.<p>This suggests to me that RSS was an output for Google products insofar as it served as a way of feeding content (and eyeballs) into Reader. Now that Reader is gone, why would Google output RSS?<p>Anyone seeing any other Google RSS feeds failing in a similar fashion?
I have no gmail account, no Youtube account, and no Google Reader...Google's always been a little too big for me to want to trust more than I have to, so I've gotten by without accounts on their services...<p>And that means I get to feel smugly superior to everyone else in this discussion.
Nobody mentioned tinytinyrss - I found it to be the best rss reader as a google reader alternative.<p>Its open source and also has an android app that rocks.
Sad, sad. I love seeing all the stealth replacements pop up in the last week or so.<p>Still, it is a sad day for RSS in general.<p>Google, this will not help me use G+.<p>Sad.
I liked Google Reader, but all those great posts queued up with no time to read them properly felt like neglected homework. It's a shame to lose it, but maybe for the best. I won't be rushing to recreate it.<p>Links posted on Hacker News and Twitter allow me to find something interesting to read when I need it, without making any kind of commitment. For the very rare thing that I don't want to miss, I subscribe by email.
I've found a decent experience using Feedly in Chrome for the desktop and GReader for Android using the Feedly API. Still not as good as EasyRSS, but it will suffice until the dust settles.<p>In other news: EasyRSS has been open sourced: <a href="https://github.com/davidsun/EasyRSS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davidsun/EasyRSS</a>
If you're looking for a new reader to try, check out www.readuction.com .<p>It's a different take on RSS, that intelligently gives you fewer articles to read. A friend and I built it over a few months, and we'd love any feedback you have.<p>You can import and export your feeds, so no need to worry about having data locked in.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
On the topic of Google Reader alternatives: most of the popular alternatives involve a central online storage. I may be unique, but I'd be quite happy for an iOS app that allows me to import my OPML file of feeds and sync it locally.<p>Given those constraints, could anyone suggest an app that would fit the bill? I've been looking, and the only app I could find that fit the criteria so far is RSSRunner by golden-apps.com -- which I'm not quite happy with.
If you still haven't found a replacement, here's our list of alternatives that was on the front page of HN on Friday: <a href="https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader" rel="nofollow">https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader</a><p>It now includes the additions mentioned in the comments and the countries where the service is hosted for those that are concerned by Prism.
If you've left finding a replacement to now, please take a second to check out kouio:<p><a href="https://kouio.com" rel="nofollow">https://kouio.com</a><p>We posted it to HN a few days ago, and since then have had over 600 signups and processed over 1.5 million feed items!<p>We've made a ton of tiny improvements since then, with many more to come.
Even though Google Reader is dead you can still migrate to alternative services, like Feedreader Online: <a href="http://feedreader.com/online/" rel="nofollow">http://feedreader.com/online/</a> Just use OPML files to import your feeds and categories.
I'm curious; given that HN represents a community that could very well be construed as the "power user" archetype, how much would people here have paid for Reader as a service? $5/month? $100/year? Free with a Google Drive subscription?
It is their right to choose to discontinue a product, I would have appreciated them more anyway if they would have chosen to give back to the community and put in the limited amount of work needed to opensource it though.<p>Goodbye Reader.
Quick poll:<p>Where do you stand on this?<p>-> Focus (1...10) Keeping the product<p>I´m a bit conflicted.. on one hand they lost user confidence by discontinuing Reader, on the other I completely get the approach to focus on a few things and really do them well.
This sucks. Hitting RE in Alfred has become muscle memory by now.<p>I've switched to Feedly and it's pretty decent. Something feels a little off, but it does most of what I want.<p>Sigh.
Happens all the time… You are the product not the customer… Thats why we built Pixter - <a href="http://pixter.in" rel="nofollow">http://pixter.in</a>
Long live to Google Reader! I hope, it will allow some startup
to come up with great products, but please ,think users first , not showing off your html5 skills or whatever... RSS is about reading text content and suscribing to feeds , not bells and whistles or closed social networking plateforms.