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What's the Best RSS Reader Not Named Google Reader?
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The news that that Google is killing off Google Reader in their annual spring cleaning means hordes of abandoned RSS users will need a new home to get their news fix before July 1, 2013. Sure, Google Reader may not have been the most beautifully designed product to come out of Mountain View, Calif., but it sure was convenient. And now that it's going away, it's evident just how valuable it has been. 'It's a tough question that's not unlike asking what's the best planet to live on not named Earth or the best thing to breathe not named air,' writes Casey Chan. 'Google Reader was that obvious a choice.' So what's the best RSS reader not named Google Reader? Is it Reeder? Or NetNewsWire? Maybe Feedly? Or should we all just ditch RSS and get with Twitter?"
Personally, I've taken a liking to Akregator on my desktop and Sparse RSS on my phone (syncing done woefully manually by exporting the list of feeds from my desktop reader and importing into the phone reader now and then). Update: 03/14 14:43 GMT by T : Depending on your aesthetics and platform of choice, you might like one of these four options, too.
"There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products,” Alan Green an engineer at Google said.
The RSS team got the axe via Google Reader, which suddenly became their least favorite app.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
In my case it's newsblur.com
Only problem is that it's still a rather small operation and right now the unexpected flood of new users is wreaking havoc on its servers.
Maybe I use RSS feeds differently than other people; but I've had trouble finding a decent reader that allows you to look at your feeds separately (on my iPad anyway - Firefox and Safari do fine if I'm on my desktop). Apparently most people like all the data all mixed in together, but I am generally reading RSS to find more targeted info - new Netflix streamable movies, for example.
#DeleteChrome
Run your own google reader:
tt-rss.org
Assuming the same content is available via twitter or facebook, it's a lot easier to miss critical information there with a constant stream. In reader I know how many updates each blog, comic or whatever has had and can easily keep up at my leisure. Instead of intermixed with all my friends on whatever social interface.
There are ways to make it look like GoogleReader I think. In the top right gear / settings, I tried "Timeline View" which gives you a blurb and image. Decent shortcuts as well.
I tried Feedly for a few minutes, but it felt like it was trying to prioritize and reorganize my news stories automatically for me and the design was awful for simply reading stuff. And it required simply too many clicks to read slashdot since I had to expand the whole summary for each item myself and even mark items as read manually. Not going back.
I'm giving Feedly a try starting today, and I think you probably have the same reaction I did: It's NOT EXACTLY THE SAME AS GREADER. But it's learnable, and it's customizable.
Keyboard shortcuts exist, but they're all different than GReader, and that takes some getting used to.
If you like GReader's compact title-only view, that's an option -- but you can also show everything by default, which is preferable if you have a folder of comics feeds like I do.
I think Feedly has two big points in its favor, though: it can sync ONCE to GReader to download your feeds (including what articles you've already read), and it's cross-browser and cross-platform with its own mobile apps. (Plus it's ad-supported, which means they have a revenue stream to keep them going in the future.)
Everything you just complained about can be changed in the preferences.
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-users-migrating-to-feedly/ might be of interest for you.
I've been using Netvibes for several years now, and am mostly pleased, partly due to its "widget" mode, which lets me separate posts by feed rather than seeing them piled up by time. It will aggregate facebook, twitter, email (subject lines only), and has various widgets for just about anything: google news searches, ebay bids/sales, stock tracking, etc.
It's mobile interface, however, has some serious flaws: it reports the wrong feed name when you select a post (I think it's showing the one you previously selected), and some feeds don't display at all (TechCrunch and MAKE, I'm looking at you) -- it might just be a matter of selecting a different version of the feed, though.
Design for Use, not Construction!
My favorite used to be RSS Reader (rssreader.com), but it hasn't been updated lately. Basic simple interface: List of feeds on the left, headlines on the right. That's all I want.
You never expect irony, do you?
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I've been playing with settings in Feedly to make it more Reader-like. There are a few problems though. First, I don't see a way to hide the number of Facebook or Google+ likes. I don't care how many people like it, only whether I do or not. Second, the Android app does not have a simplified list view; it's limiting the number of stories I can see on my phone by including a thumbnail pic that makes entries too high.
News reader makers - If you are reading the /. coverage with interest, I highly encourage you to simplify the views. I can judge whether or not I want to read something by the headline alone. The more headlines I can see at once, the better. A simple list is all I want. Give me the headline and a little icon that allows me to 'favorite' or 'star' it...maybe some small text or icon indicating what feed originated the article. On the web view, you can throw in as much text as the horizontal resolution will allow, but don't increase the vertical space per article. Make picture display and social media tie-ins preferences that can be turned off.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
So Google, you're shutting down Google Reader? Yeah, well... I'm gonna go build my own Web-Based RSS Reader with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the RSS Reader! I have been a avid Google Reader user for 3-4+ years. I check it every break at work and usually first thing in the morning on my Tablet and at night before I go to bed. Love it. After hearing this, EVERY other web based RSS / Reader site was slammed and down. Then I thought... what if any of those services just randomly *poof* overnight went offline, like Google Reader, but without notice? Having my own shared server, I looked into PHP / MySQL solutions. So far Tiny Tiny RSS Reader Wins out. http://tt-rss.org/ Set up and running in 20 minutes. Being a shared server I couldn't run daemons so I had to use a cron job to have it update the feeds every 10 minutes but it works great so far for the last 12 hours.
A buddy of mine wrote a Google Reader replacement back when they started making Google+ changes to it. I don't if its the best, I haven't checked out the others, but it meets my needs and I use it daily. It has some social features so you can share and comment on posts with your friends as well. http://1kpl.us/ (The name is a reference to when you have too many feeds and not enough time to read them - the old Reader counter would simply say "1000+" once you hit 1k unread posts)
Google has quite some balls sending me an email today asking me to upgrade my personal Google Apps account to their business tier today. Only $5/month!
You know what I would pay for? Google Reader.
(For the record, the reason I don't upgrade is because I'm a single user of the domain, but have 3 accounts - one personal, one for root, and one for a separate alerts mailbox...labels don't suffice yet).
I need something that is cross machine compatible, linking my read/unread to a single machine isn't fun
Self-hosting solutions are available, will never get canned in this manner, and are highly customizable. But, of course, require a place to host it.
I've tried both Tiny Tiny RSS and RSSLounge before in an attempt to rid myself of the Google Reader addiction, but found them both lacking in some respects every time. Since Google Reader is disappearing though, I made a new attempt this morning.
RSSLounge seems to have been abandoned a year or two ago, but perhaps it was stable enough (RSS aggregation is not nuclear science).
Tiny Tiny RSS have some in my eyes quite horrible default settings, especially coming from Google Reader. The good news, however, is that it is configurable to mimic Google Reader quite closely. With some work with custom CSS rules it is quite close at a first glance.
My Tiny Tiny RSS configuration:
Last time I installed it on Debian I ran into enough caveats that it led me to write a guide for others to install it, but since then it has been included in the unstable repository. To install it, some manual work was still needed, though:
Then go to http://localhost/tt-rss and start configuring. All subscriptions can be exported from Google Reader and imported in Tiny Tiny RSS, keeping dirctory structure intact.
I'll try to migrate fully to this solution now that Google apparently no longer wants my traffic :-) . I'd say I probably use Reader the most of all Google's services, including Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc., so the decision to can it is quite strange from my personal view.
I was turned off of theoldreader because I went to the page, and... SOCIAL SOCIAL SOCIAL MEDIA!!! See what your friends are reading! Sign in with facebook and goole plus and twitter and myspace!
I use RSS feeds mainly for research journals to watch for relevant papers as they come out. And... er... webcomics. Why the hell would I care to include my friends on either one of those? My friends are idiots. If I find a particular journal article relevant to them (or funny webcomic), I can post it to one of those various services.
Why does it seem like every RSS reader out there is trying to get me to merge it with facebook?
Step 1: Make a website that does something
Step 2: Integrate social media
Step 3: ???
Step 4: PROFIT!!!
I try to avoid companies that seem to have that plan.
*gasp* Yes I use MS Outlook. Just so it's all sorted together with my email.
What I like (or liked...) about Google Reader was that I could read some things at home on my Mac, some other at work on my PC and some others in between on mobile phone, and that the "read" status is synchronized.
I am ready to switch to anything else, as long as I can keep on reading stuff from everywhere. I am ready to install client applications.
Any idea ?
My problem is that I liked being able to dump all of my feeds into Google Reader as sort of a central storage, then use various iOS apps to read them later on. I do not have time to read them during the day, so a desktop application or web reader is useless to me. I just want a central convenient storage area for my feeds and a good mobile app to read them later that night. I will have to hold off moving my Google Reader feeds until I see where Reeder may be going with their app development.
Yes, why DOES Feedly need an extension to work? I can see where an extension might make it more *useful*, but the basic functionality doesn't need it.
I wanted a web-based reader, and did some searching last night.
I decided I wanted to go with a self-hosted option, and found SelfOSS. It's light-weight, PHP5 and the code is very clean. It can use MySQL or SQLite.
It's a single-person reader, with one username/password supported.
http://selfoss.aditu.de/
You can see a live demo here: http://stuporglue.org/selfoss/
The only downside so far is that with SQLite, the database locks when updates are running. This is fairly quick, but might be an issue for some people.
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Try doing RSS in Thunderbird, which might be closer to what you want. From what I recall, you can choose to keep the RSS feeds in a single folder, or split them by feed, plus all the easy things like marking / emailing.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
most people on planet earth have never heard of RSS and don't use it. sad but tru.
That goes against all evidence presented by the fact that RSS readers are constantly on the top downloaded apps in Apple's App Store.
I was obviously talking about the News category, not the overall shop. As an example, the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 17th, 18th apps in my local App Store, are all RSS readers.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for ages now as well. However, this particular instance is what convinced me to finally get off my ass and do what I've been meaning to do for about 2 years now:
1) New Gmail account
2) Fake Facebook account
3) Fake Twitter account
4) Use these for every sign-in thing on all the stupid websites that have a boner for social media.
These accounts will never have friends. They won't have any followers to spam. "Will you allow us to post to your feed?" 'Sure. Even I will never ever see it.' I'm happily experimenting with a couple news readers now despite their asinine requirement that I sign in or otherwise attach one of the above.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I have a confession to make. I'm forbidden from surfing the web at work, so I SSH into my own BSD shell account and browse using Lynx. Yes, Lynx, the text-only web browser. It's surprisingly functional on a lot of websites, and for some bizarre reason Google Reader has a page optimized for Lynx. 80-90% of my RSS reading is through a text-only browser.
I don't see any other services meeting that need. Feedly, or any other 'app', is a non-starter. All the services I've tried so far do not work under Lynx. I think it's the end of text-only web browsing for me -- for the entire world, in fact. That's a shame; text-only browsing is much faster, and with the ability to pipe web pages to Linux commands there's a lot of power there as well.
I feel that a subtle and powerful knowledge is passing from this world.
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