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Slashdot Asks: How Will You Replace Google Reader?
Despite a hue and cry from disappointed users, Google has not made any moves to reverse its decision to close down Google Reader on the first of July, just a few weeks away. Despite the name — and the functions it started out with in 2001 — Reader has become more than a simple interface to RSS feeds; Wikipedia gives a concise explanation of how it evolved from just a few features to a full-blown platform of its own, incorporating social-sharing features of the kind that have become expected in many online apps. Those features have morphed over the years along with Google's larger social strategies, along the way upsetting some readers who'd grown used to certain features. If you're a Google Reader user, will you be replacing it with another aggregator?
I'm going to miss igoogle :(
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
For now I'm using feed2imap with my GMail account, works good but it sucks for RSS channels with images (eg. Soup.io stream)
www.commafeed.com
The NSA already reads all the feeds I subscribe to so I don't have to!
Feedly is OK, but not as good as reader. In particular I miss being able to use it to combine multiple feeds into a bundle - which then has its own RSS feed that can be displayed on web pages. Also an embeddable view for igHome would be good
How Will You Replace Google Reader?
(Disclaimer: I'm going to use the term 'bandwidth' universally instead of the more correct 'latency' or 'throughput' so normal people can hopefully understand this post) The biggest problem I have with every alternative I have tried is that they are built with the most annoying design flaws. They are so painful to me that I am certain these flaws will be look back upon as the geocities of our modern day web development.
When I fire up an alternative, the responsiveness that was in Google Reader just isn't there. And it always seems like the alternatives require you to hit "refresh" on their interface and then what happens? It apparently makes a call out to every single RSS feed to get updates. On the surface this may seem like standard HTTP way of thinking about things. But it makes for a shit user experience. I have thousands of RSS feeds. Thousands. And if I hit refresh in this paradigm, my browser makes 1,000+ HTTP GET requests. It's not a lot of data but if even one of those requests is slow, it's usually blocking on ceding control back to me.
So let's iterate improvements on here that will get us back to Google Reader style responsiveness, shall we? Well, one of the simplest improvements I can see is to do these requests asynchronously with nonblocking web workers. You can attach each of them to the div or construct that each feed is displayed in and only have them work when that feed is visible (for instance if I am collapsing/expanding folders of feeds). You can grey out the feed until the request comes back but if another request returns first, it is parsed and inserted and activated to my vision. That way if cnn.com comes back faster than NASA's Photograph of the Day, I can read while waiting for my images.
But the core problem is that I'm on my home computer on a residential cable modem and, let's face it, Cox sucks. So what I think Google was doing was sacrificing their bandwidth to actually "reverse" the request from client to server. And, in doing so, they could package up all your updates and ship them out in one request (probably compressed). So, this is how I would approach that. Instead of doing a heart beat HTTP GET to check for RSS updates, I'd build a WebSocket and instead of requesting information, the client (browser) would be listening for information. The event/listener paradigm here would save both the user and the RSS host a lot of bandwidth but it would cost the host of the feed reader service some of that bandwidth (although much less). So basically the client JavaScript would load the page just like normal but instead of continually sending HTTP GET requests, a WebSocket would merely inform the server which feeds are active and listen for updates coming in from the server.
On the downside, this greatly complicates the server side. You need to have one be-all end-all "cache" or storage of all incoming feeds that any user is subscribed to. And for each of these feeds, you need to have a list of the users subscribed to it. And now your server will need to maintain the HTTP GET requests to cnn.com and NASA in order to get updates. When it gets an update, there's two ways you could handle it (user queues are complicated so I won't suggest that) but the most basic way is to send it right out to everyone on that subscription list who has an active WebSocket session established with their account. If a new WebSocket session is established, they simply get the last N stories from their subscriptions (Google included pagination backwards binned by time). To alleviate even more bandwidth from you, you could store it on the client side with HTML5 Web Storage and then the first thing the Web Socket does is find the last date on the last stored element and send that across to t
My work here is dung.
An application on my desktop, or "app" on a tablet or smartphone, is all the aggregation I need in order to read the RSS feeds to which I'm subscribed. The only functionality that Google Reader ever provided that I needed was syncing unread/read information across those applications. Of course, under the covers the applications were letting Google do all the heavy lifting, even the RSS feed checking. Going forward, though, all I need is an RSS reader application that's multiplatform with read/unread syncing.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
Netvibes. It was the closest I found to iGoogle in layout and functionnalities. Been using it for a year and liking it.
liferea does everything I need. prefer a local application, as it means I can read through the feeds on the train.
'Nuff said.
http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/
--
kruhft
In the very worst case, you can stand up your own server, as we have access to the source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
I've been using http://yoleoreader.com/ for the last few days and it works well for me. It even pulled the existing feeds directly from Google since I signed on with Google Account.
I'm really seriously considering going with http://theoldreader.com/ as they're the only ones who are even attempting to make a mobile website. However, their mobile site's layout is quite cumbersome to use and desperately needs fixing.
Everyone else seems overly obsessed with being "app first, screw the rest," where said apps don't run on my phone platform of choice. But if any 3rd party apps I actually can run will support other sites in time, I may give them a shot too.
I'll go for a self-hosted tinytinyRSS: http://tt-rss.org/
Never cared much for all the social features, I like keeping up with websites and being absolutely sure I haven't missed anything.
I'm not sure why I sign into google anymore. No need for reader. Youtube favs I suppose.
You can set up recipes on ifttt.com to send new feed items to different platforms. I tried sending to gmail and setting up tags and filters to keep feeds organized and out of my inbox. This worked ok. Ultimately I ended up making an unpublished Facebook page and sending feed items to it as link posts. This is working out pretty well.
I have been very happy with NewsBlur as my Reader replacement. I am now 100% switched over. I use it to read nearly 1500 feeds and performance is great. They have clients for iOS and Android and FeedMe is a decent third party Windows Phone client. For the amount of time I spend each week in feeds, I am happy to pay $20 per year for a premium NewsBlur account.
Newsblur is clean, fast and easy to use.
I'm not happy about having to do it, but I've been playing with my own Tiny Tiny RSS server installed on my file server. It runs well, but it's not Google Reader.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I've been trying inoreader and have found it to be easy to use and fairly feature-rich.
Some highlights
- Easy import of all your Google reader feeds
- Lacking an android app, but one is planned and there is a mobile version of the site
- Fast
- Free
Can't somebody who's interested just pick up the development?
The switchover was simple - log in with my goolge account and authorize it. The layout is clean, and the app form on my phone is prompt and beautiful. Thanks google for making me switch... Feedly kicks google readers butt. Feedly may not be the beat alternative, but it was the only one I tried after reading a few reviews of the options. I didn't feel the need to look any further.
More Caffeine. NOW
I've completely switched over to NetVibes, but I'm not happy about it. The Netvibes web page is slow to load and has buggy UI on every browser I've tried, especially on mobile platforms. But it does what I want it to do, which is give me my RSS feeds synched on several different devices, and it allows me to permanently save some articles.
TheOldReader probably has better UI -- because it's simpler -- but I don't believe it has the 'save' functionality that I need. Feedly is just god awful for what I need. Bloglines is NetVibes -- literally, it's a front-end for the same service. I don't know of any others that have what I want, but if I find one I'm ready to switch again in a heartbeat.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I've been really happy with http://newsblur.com/ . It has pretty much every feature of reader I cared about, with a better interface and a very dedicated individual working hard behind the scenes.
The old reader: https://theoldreader.com/ it's just like google reader
Opera's internal RSS reader was and still is the best reader out there.
I just hope the new Webkit fork version of Opera doesn't kill it.
I've found Netvibes worked well for my news feeds (switch from widget to reader view and its very similar to google reader layout). My webcomics moved over to ComicRocket which has a lot of features like keeping track of where in the archives you are when getting caught up on a series. Tried it with Outlook and Opera's RSS readers and just didn't care much for them.
This isn't sufficient.
Some of my feeds update several times a day, and yes, it would be OK to just check back regularly.
Other feeds update irregularly, sometimes with weeks or months between updates. I still want to see those updates, and I want to see them reasonably promptly. It's dumb not to automate the checking of those sites, and RSS is the rational way to achieve it.
Really bummed that Google Reader is closing. But if Google is no longer interested in my news reading habits then it's their loss. And I'll no longer be logged-in to Google all day. So it's really their loss. But a huge gain for my privacy.
At work using Windows RSS Owl is looking like my best choice. Akregator for Linux. Not yet sure what I'll use on Mac.
I've been using Reeder on my Mac + iPad, and it's pretty good. Feedly is also pretty good. Not sure which I'll end up with long-term, guess we'll see how I feel once Reader is finally dead and buried.
no longer working for cnet
The Old Reader. It's web-based and you can use Google or Facebook login, or a completely separate one if you like. Since the Google Reader shut-down was announced they've made a lot of changes including adding keyboard shortcuts mostly the same as Google Reader.
YMMV of course, but I find it a suitable replacement personally.
No technology Google ever created had a realistic long-term perspective. Hence I stayed away from it in the first place. They are not after creating infrastructure, they are after profits. "Don't be evil" has long been superseded by "be profitable".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It may have some fans, but the majority of the people on the web do not even know what Google Reader is.
Agreed. I'd never heard of it until this Slashdot article.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Ditto.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I have an instance of OwnCloud setup at home. I use it mostly for syncing contact and calendar data. I'm even subscribed to my girlfriends calendar and vice versa. The WebDav part I only really use as a quick way to get files from one device to another, and by device I mean smartphone, tablets as well as proper computers.
When Google announced the closure of Reader, OwnCloud started work on a news reader app too. I've been running it since the beta and I'm very happy.
Had to be something that i could access also from my N9, be native app or light enough html. tt-rss is good, easy to put almost anywhere. But had also support for newsblur, that is open source if i ever have to host it myself, and have some social feedback and discovery that has proved useful (better than whats hot in google reader). The only missing piece of the puzzle still is search, that is in the pipeline.
http://jonwestfall.com/2013/03/rolling-a-google-reader-replacement-with-yahoo-pipes-readability-ifttt/
Set up a separate email account, read your RSS feeds with the mail reader of your choice: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/
Several months before Google's announcement, I was fed up with some details regarding Google Reader (namely, going always through *their* servers according to *their* conditions). Given I am a systems adminstrator and have the ability (and little extra bandwidth) to self-host that service for myself, I installed a rssLounge instance.
I now learn rssLounge has been renamed to selfoss. I have yet to check this new version — but leaving minor glitches aside, rssLounge has me quite happy.
I switched to TinytinyRSS, and since its hosted on my friends server (will probably set up my own once my ESXi host gets more RAM) i dont have to worry about it suddenly dying on my. Migration was easy too since i could just export my list and import it in TTRSS.
When I received the first warning about Reader going away I started looking for alternatives. For me, having it be web-based was most important since I wanted to used it at home and work. The "at work" thing is a problem since I can't just install anything I want on my work PC.
It seems like the RSS reader market is flooded with apps so it was difficult to find web-based services. I had grown used to the Reader look and feel so I settled on NetVibes as being the closest fit.
My main criticism is NetVibes is not as fast as Reader but otherwise the format and whatnot is perfectly usable.
When they made the announcement, I tried Netvibes again and really got into it. It's got the option of reading the feeds in a Google Reader-esque interface or in more of a widget format. Moreover, you can customize whether to see it as images or listing by the feed category. That's really nice for sticking news headlines in a long list and putting image based feeds in a widget look to see what you actually want to consume. The mobile site is nice enough to eliminate the need for something app-specific and offers offline syncing options as well. It also let me import everything over while maintaining my categories.
Which works quite well. I also tried Feedly, but that comes with a weird Firefox add-on that causes high power consumption on battery...
I have been trying http://hivereader.com/ part time, while I use Feedly full-time. Hive shows a lot of promise.
I replaced it ages ago, with a simple python script croned every 15 minutes. It picks up new entries to my feeds, and emails them to me. Sieve filters those emails into a different mailbox, so I've a special mailbox which is basically entries for my rss feeds.
I don't know why I've never made a web interface for that, it might become pretty popular. :P
with a small perl script.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
You must have a lot of spare time. I just want to zip through the news looking for anything that interests me. That is when an RSS reader really helps. I don't have time to load up 10 websites 5 times a day, re-reading the same headlines many times over. Going back to that would be like going back to writing with quill and parchment instead of using a keyboard and screen.
It's rather difficult to replace something I never used.
Clicking on 4 bookmarks in the morning is not a great hardship. I might click on them again at lunch. I'm certain that it doesn't materially impact my spare time.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I use tt-rss. It runs on my web server so i't always on, has mobile interfaces, runs in any browser. Try it.
http://tt-rss.org/
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
Sharpreader
sharpreader.net
It's old and hasn't been updated in forever, but it's clean, simple, and fast. Faster than any other reader I've tried (such as RSS Owl or Liferea).
On the desktop I've switched to Newsbeuter, and I'll probably skip reading feeds on my phone.
Unselfish actions pay back better
Right now I'm using a small program I wrote [1], which is more than enough for my personal use.
Launch it and it will output a list of new articles (title+link) sorted by source. Pipe the output to sendmail and you get some kind of rss2email digest mode.
[1] https://github.com/tgirod/feedme
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
I switched to tt-rss and couldn't be happier. It works almost exactly like Google Reader and even includes plugins to allow you to use the same navigation keys. It can import OPML for your feeds list and has a plugin to import your starred posts. The only downside is not being able to play flash video (youtube, et al) in the reader pane.
Never used it.
I used Google Reader more than any other Google service. Which is why when they announced discontinuation, I decided to roll my own replica.
I've moved to feedly.
I follow over 60 sites. If I could manually check each one in 5 seconds, it would take me 5 minutes - not counting the actual reading. With a "freaking 24/7/365 watchbot", that's down to, essentially, zero.
Now, of course, it would be even quicker to go cold turkey and drop all those blogs. I don't want to do that; why should I?
I tried both Feedly and NewsBlur, and both did a lot of things I did not want or need. They were pretty, but when it came down it it I was losing control of my important feeds.
I had to upgrade my ancient Linux server (it was overdue) before I could install it (although I think they might have relaxed some of the requirements now)
I am very happy with it now. It is lean and light, clean and works flawlessly for me.
The android app is written by the developer and rivals that of Google Reader. (clean and simple) Although it is paid... but I don't mind paying for it for all I got.
I can recommend it to everyone who feels a bit of reticence and want and alternative.
That's great if you're only interested in 4 sites. What if you're interested in 60?
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. Why should we be subjected to articles about stuff you know nothing about?
Indeed, the articles should only relate to areas of your expertise, like realtime midget scat porn, and arithmetic for 'tards.
Looking forward to your daily updates.
cheers,
This is what I've been looking for! I was trying Feedly, but their interface isn't nearly as responsive or well-organized.
Switched over to feedly now but thought I'd go back to GR to save a list of feeds. I get a dialog reminding me that GR will close in July, but I can't close the dialog. Whatever I try, that dialog stays there. So, for me, GR is pretty much closed already.
Already have replaced Google Reader with Feedly... MUCH better than Reader ever was..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Switched over to feedly now but thought I'd go back to GR to save a list of feeds. I get a dialog reminding me that GR will close in July, but I can't close the dialog. Whatever I try, that dialog stays there. So, for me, GR is pretty much closed already.
Garry Knight
I am self hosting using Tiny Tiny RSS and a rasberry pi. I have found it to work quite well as a news aggregation appliance.
The performance is a little sluggist compared from google reader, but I figure in a year or two, something with more cpu horsepower will come along and I can upgrade.
Another option to consider to hosting TTRSS on something like heroku.
I find it more efficient than having 200 feeds downloading from separate sources.
I just run a couple of rsstail-instances in a couple of multitail windows. Works for me.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
The Old Reader is almost as good as Google Reader for my use. I just want a simple web browser based list of my article subscriptions.
I tried Feedly, and other "replacements" but they were just too annoying with their stupid swiping and web browser plugins.
http://blogtrottr.com/
This has been working very well for me since Google first announced the upcoming demise of Google Reader. RSS -> GMail, then GMail via phone, desktop, IMAP, etc. Plus now I can leave an entry marked unread for as long as I want, easily archive the contents offline, delete entries, and forward them as emails without having to fill in a CAPTCHA.
In a few days of spare time, I added an RSS Aggregator to my blogging engine. Only tracks a single list of feeds per blog, and only works in Lisplog, which is currently not easy for non-wizards to get bootstrapped, but it serves my purposes.
https://billstclair.com/blog/aggregator/
https://lisplog.org/aggregator/
I never understood this desire to put everything as a web service.
Why is RSS not just an Email mailer that can send news to my Email address?
IMAP is perfect for it, and POP3 is also capable. Plus you have encryption (IMAPS), user management, and you don't need Yet Another App.
There is for example rss2email that can receive RSS feeds and send them as Email. Here is come better documentation: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rss2email
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Since I never used it (or even heard about it until it was cancelled).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I went with Tiny Tiny RSS. despite its name, the native interface is actually quite bloated. But fortunatley someone has written a fairly minimalist plugin UI which performs quite well on mobile devices.
I'm not sure if it's just me, or if all of the "social" features of many of the other RSS are actually useful to others. But all I really wanted is a simple thing that tracks which articles are new vs. what I've read. Pretty much every reader I came across was bloated with a lot of features and decorations that slowed it down. I belive I've got a good enough solution with Tiny Tiny RSS. It requires you to host the app on your own website, so it's not going to work for everyone, nor be exactly easy to set up.
but if i had, id replace it with an open source alternative. the problem would then be, without google, id have the crushing burden of choosing any of 23 well developed multiplatform alternatives that respect my privacy and freedom... http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?license=opensource&tag=rss-aggregator
23 you say? I get "No Results" when clicking on that link. I've looked for open source alternatives, and the only ones I found were TT-RSS and Newblur. TT-RSS doesn't fetch half my feeds and it gets the dates wrong, sometimes by as much as 4 days, on the ones it does. The sole developer is a dick swearing at his users telling them there's nothing wrong with his software, it's the feed or the user. Newsblur, according to the only online article about installing it, requires two different database engines and an S3 account to install.
unless you like to read a wide variety of things i have in my desktop email/rss reader over 70 feed many of those are from aggregators/webspiders that scower the web looking for more content on a specific subject giving me a feed, rss for people who enjoy reading or need to stay up to date on things is great.
oh and its pretty good for torrents too.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Booz employee here. I use NSA reader to read your emails. Of course, most of your emails are boring so I have to run a filter to only include the good stuff -- drugs, gay sex, nude pics of your girlfriend (and/or mother in one case), etc. Our image analysis algorithms are pretty good, so I can exclude goatses and fat chicks.
I never used it either. I don't say that to brag about ignorance (?!) but just to put this into context:
Every single description of Google Reader that I've read (keeping in mind that I've never tried it ; I realize this is a recipe for talking out of one's ass) make it sound utterly trivial, a product that any programmer could clone in an hour. It merges RSS feeds? Seriously? People are bent out of shape by that?!
Of course not. I know it can't merely be an RSS merger/splitter/etc which also happens to have a web page view of the resulting feed(s), but that's how everyone describes it. And when you read that it's hard to get motivated and curious to go see what it really is. ;-)
Hey wait, maybe I am bragging about ignorance. Nooo!! I'm bitching about the fact that no person has ever explained why anyone would give a damn about Google Reader and ever mentioned a single interesting or nontrivial aspect of it. Ever. Even here on Slashdot, nobody really says anything substantial about it. Google Marketing Fail. No wonder they're turning it off; they never turned it on, in the business sense.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Feedly has been good for my uses thus far. Multi-platform, web support, and it can be "toned down" enough for lightweight / rapid reading. Google Currents offers some cool layout options (for Android), but really lacks in terms of feed support and managing subscriptions. I'm by no means a power user with RSS, but find my bare requirements (self-managed lists/groups, mark read after viewing, iOS/Android/Browser support, images disabled in headline view) best served by Feedly.
If your websites are in the hundreds, then yes I am incapable of loading hundreds of websites manually by hand every single day.
I've been using The Old Reader. It's not that bad, it's way better than when I tried it a few months ago. Good at home, good at work and hope it will improve at mobile. I will probably stop using google chat because of this change, and will only receive my e-mails via mobile client/Outlook. Just hope Google don't delete all my feeds for Google Alerts.
There is a steep learning curve, but having mail and news in one place is nice. This video gives a preview of how it works.
Still rough in some respects, but entirely usable right now, and there's even an Android app. Hell, the dev behind the current quasi-official Android app (there's also a more-official one planned, and of course there's an open---albeit not yet stable---API) has even made it work on Android 2.1 devices, so my rooted Nook Touch works. Reading RSS on an e-ink screen? As the kids wouldn't say anymore, hells to the yes.
Okay, so I'm using EC2 for the server at the moment, thus relying on a third party again. But since it's ownCloud, I can back up and reimport my entire setup on any webserver I control anywhere, so if Amazon self-destructs or such I'm not left searching for another full solution stack. Never again. Plus, well, I'm a KDE user, and integration in Akregator is coming down the line in theory. So I'll be able to have discrete desktop and mobile apps for a web service that I can put up wherever I have hosting. That's not a solution for everyone per se (although if any of my friends want to use it I'll obviously give them accounts) but it's a pretty perfect replacement for my own needs.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I've been using NewsBlur for the past 2-3 weeks. I like it, & I totally recommend it to my fellow Google Reader exiles. It's not perfect, but it's close enough for me.... 'til something better shows up. I'm still surprised Google shut down Reader. They really didn't "get it" did they? They could've used that to make a tidy profit on the side, if not a big profit right down the pipe. They could've used it to combine with their social stuff, and made a sort of twitter/news hybrid. I really think that could've been huge, so I think they missed the boat on this. Good news tho... now the feed reader "market" can get competitive & inventive again.
I'm not, but if I was I wouldn't expect Google to bail me out.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Feedly has been amazing to those of us migrating from Google Reader: http://feedly.com/
It may have some fans, but the majority of the people on the web do not even know what Google Reader is.
Agreed. I'd never heard of it until this Slashdot article.
Please list everything you do not know about. If you cannot list that, how the **** do you expect anyone else to know the extent of your uninformedness?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I've been using Feedly increasingly since a few days after the announcement. At first it was a simply awful replacement, but the devs seem eager to implement the full gambit of Reader's abilities, and since then all of the features I used from Reader have been implemented (although some perhaps sub-optimally). My only real complaint is how ridiculously long it takes to load compared to Reader. I also haven't given the add-on a serious try (I've mostly browsed from Android phone).
I don't need to read feeds from multiple devices. That means I don't need to synchronize. And, that mean I don't need Google Reader, or Feedly, or the hassle of Tiny Tiny RSS, or whatever.
What I need is a local RSS reader, a client. I already have that, and I had it before Google invented Reader.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Taptu is cross platform, and it seems to work quite well, at least for my needs.
You can roll multiple feeds into streams (e.g., combine local news channel and newspaper feeds into one called 'Local news', or take multiple tech forum feeds and roll them into one 'Tech News' stream). Read/unread syncing is pretty reliable, and you can log in using your current Google Reader account to load your feeds directly. Once they're in Taptu, it doesn't matter if they disappear from Google Reader...I think. Guess we'll see in a couple of weeks!
Whoops...one thing I just discovered: there doesn't seem to be any way to directly add an RSS feed that's not curated by their 'Stream Store', at least from the browser interface. That's a bit maddening...oh well, it'll work, for now.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
install sage and be a man and pull down your own fucking rss feeds
... and so far it's working great for me (RSSOwl). I also tried The Old Reader, and quite liked it except for its inability to mix all feeds into one continuous timeline.
I understand that English is a living language, but I object to changes arising merely from repeated errors.
Oh, that Google. I didn't use Reader too much, but it was great service. I switched to Feedly, because of UI/UX, and it also has Android app, so...
I have my own now. I got myself a domain, and I am running Tiny Tiny RSS (tt-rss).
I'll tell you what I won't be doing.
I won't be replacing my RSS feed with full article content and images and videos that are static -- staying until I read them -- with high signal to noise ratio . . . with fucking twitter and facebook, which is what every fucking idiotic dumbshit pundit I have seen commenting about RSS the last few months has said everyone is doing, while RSS "is dying".
With theoldreader, it does everything greader does (by design: that was its goal, hence the name.) I'm perfectly happy with it as a replacement.
I've tried most of them and, to be honest, they are all pretty rubbish. I don't want any fancy new bells and whistles - but what Google Reader had today (minus the sharing bit) would be just fine.
Unfortunately none of the alternatives I looked at could manage that. From non-working sites, to ghastly user interface design, to one which requires a browser plug-in just to work (seriously wtf?).
On that basis, I'm really hoping that Digg Reader (whenever it arrives) doesn't suck. If it does, then I don't think there are any viable alternatives.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Really wasn't that hard to replace iGoogle + GReader.
This puts more of the burden on yourself - the reason we have computers is to automate the mundane and tedious.
http://go-read.appspot.com/ --- SER
I use enmingle.com, a social site for file sharing and news aggregation (among other things).
I prefer them to any rss reader. No idea why anybody wouldn't either. If I want google news I can get it in my firefox favorites tool bar.
Neither did anyone else; Google had a technical solution to a problem that some people had, people liked it, now it is going away. There are other people with similar solutions, and we're each trying to figure out which one fits our needs best.
My use of a reader solves a slightly different problem; I personally do not follow all that many sites but many of the ones I do follow update irregularly, so it is easier for me to simply be notified when they do update than to uselessly visit a page that has nothing new. Even the ones that update regularly but not daily lend themselves to a feed reader for me; I don't need a scheduled stop on M-W-F for Site A and M-F for Site B, and just Mondays for Site C; they all just pop into the reader whenever they update, and I don't particularly care when that is. A reader also makes sure I don't miss anything, because it keeps track of what I've already read.
Meanwhile, bookmarks work just fine and none of this impacts you at all; what's the problem?
I'm not incapable, but why should I? I could also walk everyplace, but I drive a car. Similarly, visiting a page to see whether it is updated is highly inefficient. Much better to have the site let me know when there is new content. If you track a lot of content, maintaining that many bookmarks becomes unwieldy. There are a few reasons to use subscription-based methods to browse the web. Perhaps you should actually look into things before rushing to judgment. It just may be possible that everyone besides you is not an idiot.
No, I think I'm going to continue to store all my data locally like I have for two decades.
I don't need a web interface, so KDE Kolab and Kontact/Thunderbird. It's a full PIM suite, so it also provides centralised storage for a bunch of other things as well.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
I can absolutly recommend NewsBlur!!
http://www.newsblur.com/
It's better than GoogleReader and is OpenSource. You've 3 options:
- use the free account (up to 64 sites)
- pay 24$/year for unlimited sites + extra features (fair price if you ask me)
- geek option: set it up yourself (you have all features in that way) -> https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur.git
Plus, it comes with free iOS and Android-Apps.
I've set it up myself last week and said goodbye to google reader.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I've been using selfoss. URL: http://selfoss.aditu.de/
Set it up on my own server with a cron job to poll my feeds every X minutes. It stores the fetched results in either a SQLite file or another database backend.
Personally I just wait until the story comes out on Slashdot. After all, this place is still "news for nerds / stuff that matters" right?
http://www.reader2000.com
Well, for one thing it has an API and a very large percentage of the RSS readers out there (on phones especially) use Google Reader as a backend.
I've never actually *used* Google Reader. I created an account, and I've set up some feeds on the Google Reader site. I then pointed my NewsRob app on my Android phone to Google Reader, and I *do* use the heck out of that.
Reportedly Feedly has replicated Google's API, and some of the apps that used GR as a backend are supposedly being modified to use Feedly as a backend. No official word whether NewsRob will do so, but they're "in talks."
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Seriously. I tried Google Reader, and I kept forgetting to look at it.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Not perfect, but it's pretty close and I store everything on my own server.
Bamboo reader has become my reader of choice
I use newsbeuter and sync all my read/unread threads automatically by linking the cache.db to my Dropbox folder. .txt file for easy reading on my ebook reader.
When deeply interested in a topic, i simply press o which opens a new tab in my opened browser. Oh, and i
can export all relevant feeds into a
Mail, contacts and calendar - options are going to me.com - not really a fan of more tie in, but at least supports push mail to my phone and tablet, or a zimbra mailserver appliance as a VM. Online filestorage: Dropbox and Mega are filling that role nicely, I might ass an owncloud server on a VM. Online Office suite: you know, a crappy old PC with enough RAM running ubuntu, VMware Server, a desktop VM, and the above VMs, and VNC or X11 tunnelled over SSH works well enough for me. I can get VNC or SSH/X11 clients on just about anything. Could also run an Open SSL VPN appliance. Software cost for the above: free Might have to buy a DNS name, as DynDNS is getting less friendly, Ive already lost my old [host].homelinux.org domain from them 8(
This pushed me to finally set up a small server at home. Had been meaning to for a long time, just to learn about it, but never did. Now I have a small server with Tiny Tiny RSS running on it. Not too difficult to set up, and works really well. The Android app is not NewsRob quality but it's good enough to use on a daily basis.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I have been using Tiny Tiny RSS since March, ever since Google announced they are discontinuing Reader.
It works well, and close enough to Reader. Imported my RSS without issues.
Once issue I am facing is that the session times out a couple of times per day.
This is despite having the following settings in config.php:
Any idea why this happens?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I've been using Brief (add-on for Firefox) for about two months, and I'm quite satisfied. Getting used to the bookmark integration took some time, but it's not so bad. It can import feeds exported from Google Reader. More details here.
Feedly has replaced Google Reader, I like it more. I get a lot of reading done while taking a shit now.
Simple. I'm an average user. If average users don't know something, then logically, I don't either.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Not sure if it's ok to self-promote here, but we've been hacking on a replacement for about 9 weeks now:
https://www.readraven.com
It's still a very young project in that we're still working through our UI bugs, but our full intention is to be a long term project designed around a few key values:
- longevity
- privacy
- simplicity
- beauty
For more about what we stand for, check out our values:
https://www.readraven.com/values
The long term plan is to charge money for the service because that is the most transparent way for us to build for forever. We think selling user information to advertisers is not only a bad business model, but also creates an adversarial relationship with users.
As I said, we're still really young, but our backend is working well, and we hope to iterate rapidly. Check us out, if you like.
Alex Chiang
https://www.readraven.com
http://chizang.net/alex/blog
I for once used google reader to listen to my podcasts. It kept them all in the same place whenever I switched machines.
Recently I found PODFY (http://www.podfy.com/) that works on a PC, phone or tablet and never looked back.
Seriously! It's awesome
I used to be
I've been using ifttt and gmail since just after they announced retiring Google reader. It works pretty good so far: http://prlj13-whatimupto.blogspot.ca/2013/06/rss-replacing-google-reader-with-ifttt.html
I can't stand all these browsy, graphical rss readers, and press ( paid ) has a great interface for *reading* news. They have promised a new backend before the demise of reader... don't know if there is a ios client.
After trying options (Feedly, TT-RSS, NewsBlur, others), none were satisfying.
So I wrote some PHP scripts that pull in RSS/Atom, parse them, and inject them via IMAP into a Gmail account. The keyboard shortcuts aren't quite as nice Reader (but Reader's weren't perfect).
When Google kills Gmail, I'll just export via IMAP, and import to some other IMAP server/email reader.
Not a cloud service, but this can help Ubuntu users:
http://code.google.com/p/feedindicator
Lightweight: no UI apart from the status bar icon, which develops into a menu that shows recent items (optionally in sub-menus). Click on an item to open it in your browser.
I have been using The Old Reader https://theoldreader.com/ for a little over a week now and it's great.
I'm switching back to Opera. Has always had a (better) feeds reader. It's just fastest I know for reading/skimming.
Opera will be using Chromium from now on (Thought 14 is not available for Linux yet). So no reason to not use Opera anymore. I switched in the past, because of the lack of support for Opera by the mayor websites.
My favorite in this time - inoreader.com ;)
I don't like Feedly, because it not allow export my feeds.
Vienna is great for Mac users.
We still need that list.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I have all my feeds sent to my email account using http://blogtrottr.com/... I can just read them along with other email messages.
MetaARPA members of SDF have access to tt-rss, and SDF is worth supporting: http://sdf.org/?join#meta
I've been using The Old Reader and I really like it. It doesn't have an app yet but the web interface is nice.
http://theoldreader.com
I switched to RSSowl.org desktop app. It was meant as the first of however many tests until I settled on a replacement for Google Reader, but it works fine so I am sticking with it.
It always seemed a bit cumbersome to me, but when Google announced end of life for their Reader, I've moved to Thunderbird with my feeds and it works well enough. But, I might be a special case - I no longer work on more computers than my laptop, so I have no need for a web-based reader.
People recommend all kinds of webappy RSS-readers instead of Google Reader. But the actual point of Google Reader was not that it was a web app. The point was that it was a backend and API for reading and syncing your news with hundreds of clients on all platforms that used Google Reader as a way to sync your stuff.
NONE of all the other services, apps, websites, browser extensions that are trying to do the same actually do the same. With Google Reader as a de-facto standard for that there was real competition between applications that all worked with the same backend. What we have now is full fragmentation into dozens or hundreds of incompatible services.
What we not have (and won't get) is the one thing that would be able to replace Google Reader: An open standard that could be supported by all kinds of clients and servers which then would work seamlessly which each other.
That so few people understand this is baffling. Sometimes I think that the Internet is turning from a network based on open standards into a set of proprietary and incompatible services is just natural: People want this and even many geeks don't understand the difference.
Me? I suppose I will use the opportunity to kick that habit. I have been reading dozens of feeds daily for many years and I don't think I really got anything out of it but wasted time. The world is crazy anyway, I won't change it and getting angry every day isn't actually worth it.
BazQux is not free, but cheap. It's UI is cleaner than Reader, and above all : it displays comments from blogs.
The more I use it, the more I like being able to read comments.
Never used it, won't ever miss it.
So what the hell is one of these things, what do I need it for, and should I kill others in my grief over it's passing?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Recently launched http://reader.curata.com "the cleanest, easiest and simplest reader"