Goodbye Google Reader

Wow. I use Google Reader every day, and I still can't quite figure out what I'm missing by not using all these other services. Somehow, I'm able to share, read what others are posting, and keep up with threads.<p>Most importantly, Google Reader keeps continuity. It has a history, a context that I find missing from the jumble of posted links and "in medias res" comments I get on my social share streams.<p>I don't see myself giving it up anytime soon. (Like others have posted, I do miss Bloglines...)

I used Google Reader for years and years as a central repository for all of the webcomics i read.<p>I switched to Newsblur this year and haven't looked back. It definitely has a better take on sharing.

I continue to use gReader more frequently than any other news app. It's lightweight, on all the devices I use, and addresses my reading needs at least sufficiently.<p>My take on advertising likely differs from most here; I don't mind others paying the bills with my attention -- GOOG does a decent job of it, even. I understand and appreciate it goes deeper than text ads displayed contextually to the feeds' stories. Retargeting, psychographics and inference are OK by me, too.<p>I completely appreciate the wish to pay for a service in place of having one's contrail sold. Believing your attention and behaviors don't get sold -- or wont get sold -- because you pay should not be a presupposition (c.f. cable tv and [your ISP here]).<p>From the post -- "and I certainly don’t buy products that aren’t in some way designed to be functional" -- I don't understand how this would be otherwise: would you buy something without intended function?<p>There also seems to be no attention paid to Chrome Sync (yes, they're likely selling our contrails), Delicious, and other services that've come and gone.<p>I will provide my attention in return for services I find of value. gReader's been such for several years. Until there's a clearly compelling alternative, I'll stick with it.

In case there's any confusion, the article's actual title is "Goodbye ubiquitous digital service" and uses the phrase "most ubiquitous RSS service of our time" as a euphemism for "Google Reader", hence the headline here.

I miss Bloglines, honestly. I switched to greader after bloglines started having DB problems several years ago, but never really liked the UI - seemed too bloated and slow. I switched to using Reeder as a frontend, but in an effort to switch to local services I started using Fever + Sunstroke (iOS app). My main beef with Fever is that if you're reading an article and it does a feed refresh it will refresh the view and take away the article you were reading (since it was marked as read).

Does scoring (i.e. "designed to surface interesting content") really work out for you guys? I tried this back in the jurassic age with GNUS etc., and even then I always felt like I might miss something…<p>So right now, my prime metric for any RSS reader is how easy it is to get through my items and filter them out. Right now I'm using Google Reader for that again, and between vi-like keyboard shortcuts, "v" to open a tab in the background (w/ simple FF hack) and using either "starring", instapaper or pinboard for "read later" functionality, I'm pretty happy. Sure, if I'm away from my computer for quite a while, things pile up. But as I've said, just reading those scored "important" while just marking the rest as read would worry me a a bit. Never mind that syncing + webapp really makes it easy to keep up with things, even if I'm away from my computer.<p>I guess you need more support if your subscriptions are that huge or if you're aggregating aggregators.<p>Still, just like with gmail, I wouldn't mind seeing a good self-hosted replacement. Preferably one that doesn't have more requirements than a Van Halen tour rider.

I still use Google Reader, but only vicariously through the apps that utilize it as a backend, after having switched away from using GR directly quite a while ago. In all honestly, if both apps[1] I use swapped backends to something else, I likely wouldn't notice.<p>[1]: apps: Reeder (mac, iphone); Mr. Reader (ipad)

I've recently found The Old Reader: <a href="http://theoldreader.com/" rel="nofollow">http://theoldreader.com/</a><p>Feels like greader would be if they kept driving it forward. They also do an import of all your greader feeds in one step, so I was able to just drop-in replace greader.

* Bookmarking: Mozilla Sync. It works perfectly for all my web bookmarks. It's free software, free service (as free of charge), it's encrypted so no one else can peek there for advertisement or what not. And it obviously works right in the browser syncing between all your instances.<p>* RSS: There are many different FOSS RSS aggregators. What do you need to pay for there? Akregator for example.<p>* Social network: Diaspora. Ad free, privacy oriented, free software as well. Free service too (no fees).<p>In essence, not every free service is built on breaching privacy of users to sustain itself.

It's a real shame that Google Reader has been neglected for years now.

Too bad most of the RSS readers on iOS just plug in to Google Reader for feed management. Somehow they went from manual RSS to manual + Google Reader to Google Reader exclusive.

I wrote this tool a while back to migrate my Google Reader to Twitter followings … since most of my RSS was pre-Twitter: <a href="http://tmnt.benguild.com" rel="nofollow">http://tmnt.benguild.com</a><p>Then, I put only the 4 or 5 websites I check religiously into Google Reader, so that I can always get every update from those versus skimming the latest posts in my Twitter stream.<p>I find this a better/ideal solution, since that way it's 140 character summaries instead of entire articles that are unclear.

I tweaked my Google Reader to get back the functions that were dropped out. You can read more here: <a href="http://tek-that.blogspot.com/2012/10/getting-good-old-note-in-reader-back.html" rel="nofollow">http://tek-that.blogspot.com/2012/10/getting-good-old-note-i...</a><p>Note sure if it helps, but thought I would share it..

This was good. Thanks Chris.<p>There's a lot of thought-less consumption of (supposedly) free technology going on. I keep waiting to see more backlash about it. Instead I see a person here or there figure it out, share with others, everybody nods their heads sagely, then we go on as always.<p>What with YouTube purging a bunch of fake video watches this week, it certainly looks to me from the business side that we're scaling the freemium model way past where it would naturally take us. We're creating empty houses full of sock puppets. Meanwhile somebody has to pay the electric bill.<p>Keep up the good writing!

Google has stopped doing anything with its interface but that hasn't stopped dozens of others who sync with Google Reader. I personally find that Newisfy (iOS) does everything I need for a Google Reader client. Don't like Newsify? Then choose from among many other apps on many platforms that sync with Google Reader.<p>I personally far prefer this arrangement to Twitter. I don't really like the Twitter concept to begin with but I can't even make it more palatable with a better client because they keep pulling the rug out from those who create better Twitter clients.

Fever looks interesting. However, the video that walks through installing recommends changing the permissions on a folder and its contents (complete with executable code) to 777.<p>O_O<p>Not sure I trust you with my feeds.

I use Tiny Tiny RSS[1] self-hosted and it's been running great. In many ways (design, key bindings, etc) it's a Reader clone, but it's fast, open source[2], has a good JSON API and it runs fine on nginx + Postgresql.<p>[1]: <a href="http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki" rel="nofollow">http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS</a>

Hi Chris Webb, Thank you very much for sharing alternative apps.<p>I'm searching for a service which wouldn't be hosted or have a dns name in U.S., especially for mails, because subponeas are not controlled enough there. Is there any chance some YC start-up works on something similar?

"As a front-end developer and modern first-world citizen" -&#62; This sounded douchey.

Feedspot.com anyone? New startup in the town. Looks promising.<p>Try it out <a href="http://feedspot.com" rel="nofollow">http://feedspot.com</a>

I use Fever. Quite excellent, and very relevant in the context of what Instagram have been doing.

pinboard is great<p>What i'd like now is a better version of instapaper or the alternatives.

Bad link in the link to Fever.

Twitter is my RSS reader. Frankly, I'm surprised RSS is even still around. Twitter won that war.