Slashdot Mirror
Google Reader: One Year Later
Nate the greatest (2261802) writes "Just over a year has passed since Google closed Google Reader; have your reading habits changed? When Google announced in March 2013 that Google Reader would close, a number of pundits saw it as a sign of the imminent death of RSS feeds as redundant tech. But 15 months has gone by and I can't see that very much has changed. Former Google Reader users fled to any number of smaller competitors, including Feedly, which as a result quadrupled its userbase from around 4 million users to around 15 million users and 24,000 paying customers in February 2014. I can't speak for you but I am still getting my news from RSS feeds, just like I did before the Readerpocalypse. Zite might be gone and Pulse might belong to LinkedIn but RSS feeds are still around."
no
It saved me so much time. And hassle.
I still miss it. Surely the data harvesting would have been worth it, for a behemoth like Google to just keep it running.
I use Feedly, but it's not the same.
Still using RSS.
The death of GReader led me to Feedly which has nearly all of the features that GReader had backed by a company whom RSS isn't an experiment and truly GOT RSS. Feedly saw a need in the market place and filled that void that Google abandoned.
I am more than happy with Feedly and their feature set. I threw them some money to support them and tell everyone I know to use them as their apps work just as well if not better than what Google was trying to do.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Good combo on Windows Phone and Windows 8 on tablets (on desktops Feedly is enough, sometimes I use Nextgen Reader windowed with Modernmix).
Haven't missed anything specific from Google Reader and took the opportunity to reduce Google products usage just to search.
I was mildly surprised to see this:
https://plus.google.com/photos/+JeanLouisNguyen/albums/6028975918934522689/6028975958899375922?pid=6028975958899375922&oid=100130762972482716067
I have never used any RSS-program but I use my facebook wall like that of what I understood RSS is, just like the pages of site, like slashdot, wired, newspaper etc and it comes there, of course you going to miss things, as it can becomes quite alot if you have a active wall with friendfeeds combined with the ones of the pages
Following the end of Google reader, I built a custom web based replacement.
It uses drupal, with the feeds module to import the content, flags to tag it, ans custom views for display.
Dit works well for me, but as I stopped working on it it lacks essential features so I never opened it to anyone else (for exemple, there is no link to view all articles from a feed. When I need to, I change a 'new' to 'All' un thé URL.)
InoReader lets me do all the same things I did with Reader, with the added bonus of not providing Google more user data.
Never used Google Reader in the first place. At home, I've always been using a combination of other options to read feeds, mainly a self-written feed gatherer, and at work, where I used the now equally deceased iGoogle, I've simply switched to ighome.com.
My habits haven't changed a bit, even uses the same hotkeys.
Agreed. Inoreader is a great replacement. I first jumped to The Old Reader, but that got overwhelmed and then they stopped taking new subscribers, and inoreader seems to have the required feature set that Google Reader had.
Google Reader was merely the most popular 'client' app - its disappearance wouldn't spell the doom of feeds (RSS/atom/whatever), and here's why: practically all the major publishing apps have RSS functionality built-in.
Do you use Wordpress? You probably have an RSS feed whether you're aware of it or not.
Using phpBB? You probably have an RSS feed.
Started a subreddit? It comes with a bunch of feeds.
Now try to get an RSS feed for, say, https://twitter.com/slashdot .
Or how about an RSS feed for https://www.facebook.com/slash... ?
facebook still offers an RSS for timelines, but you'll have to get it first as it's keyed.
twitter doesn't offer an RSS at all, you'll just have to use the APIs (and you'll need to authenticate even if you only want public read access, so you'll have to register, too). And don't think about trying to offer an API-to-RSS bridge, Twitter doesn't take kindly to such awesomeness; http://tweet-2-rss.appspot.com...
These 'social media' platforms of course want you to stay inside their boundaries. If you want to know what @Whoever is up to, you'll just have to view twitter or, better yet, 'Follow' that user and make sure you've got yourself logged in on as many devices as possible preferably with the official twitter apps.
So what happens when a company no longer regularly posts their news or blog posts via their regular content delivery, and instead takes to twitter / facebook? The feed dies out. Sure, it's still there, and maybe once in a blue moon some new content does pop up on there.. but for that same content and everything else you'd be interested in, you'll just have to check them out on facebook and/or twitter.
It's only when companies start realizing this shift - and, again, they might not even be fully aware that they're offering a feed in the first place - that they might try shutting it down for fear of not reaching the right viewership (in the way they want, including the possibility of deleting a post that they later regret).
At least feeds will remain as the premiere way to deliver podcasts (hacked on as they are) ... until some sort of social podcasting platform emerges as the de facto standard and requires you to use their website/proprietary apps.
For me, RSS is the stuff to justify playing around with fancy desktop gadjets and mobile apps.Setting up the perfect desktop/homescreen with INFORMATION everywhere. So efficient!
Then never to be used, or read afterwards.
Switched to Tiny Tiny RSS. Hosting it on a shared hosting (Dreamhost) which I was paying for anyway. It works great, and its nice having a solution that won't just disappear one day. Sure my web host could disappear, but I could always switch to another one.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm happy with the way it works, for the most part. Bit of a shame it has to use external authentication, but I use a secondary account for that anyway. The fact that some features are pay to use is a bit irritating, and I haven't yet decided whether they're worth it. I am willing to pay for services that provide value for me - they're a business, and I understand their need to make money to provide the service - but there isn't much compelling in the pro feature set for me. Possibly Evernote integration, but it's not that much hassle to click through to the website and clip it from there.
Bottom line, though, is that it's better to be a paying customer - at least you know the business has a vested interest in the product. Same with Evernote vs. free options. They make their money from users who get value from their products.
I was also reasonably impressed with Feedly's transparency over the recent DDOS attacks they (and Evernote) suffered.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I don't have the time to go to every news page and look through if something new and important was written. So I still use RSS. I want the information come to me, not to chase it.
My project is in a really early state (no customer - problem fit) as I haven't had the time to invest lately. Feel free to drop me a mail (next-reader@gmx.net) If you want to get updates or want to help me find out what current "problems" with readers and information acquiring in general you have. :) *sorry for slashvertising*
This Firefox add-on continues to work just fine for me, and I'm practically unaffected if someone tries to kill it. It has three panes so it looks like a mail client, which is a simple and straightforward way of navigating and reading the bulk of RSS content.
I never really trust companies with my daily needs. The dependency is stressful and unpractical, so I try to avoid it whenever possible.
For feeds I use Tiny Tiny RSS these days, hosted on a VPS with some other daily stuff (mail, calendar, notes). The application is a lot slicker than the website would suggest. I highly recommend it.
Since RSS seems to take a back seat in modern web development (FOLLOW US ON TWITTER!), I also do some screen scraping in PHP to create my own feeds for sites that don't (properly) support it.
The Old Reader (http://theoldreader.com/) works pretty well for me. Not quite as sophisticated or instantly speedy as Google was, and it can take a few more minutes to be up-to-date, but free and you can import your feeds, which you had already exported from Google Reader, right?
My UID is prime!
I went to g2reader and didn't miss a beat.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
InoReader lets me do all the same things I did with Reader, with the added bonus of not providing Google more user data.
If you're not using noscript or at least ghostery, the joke's on you. InoReader uses Google Analytics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I tried practically every alternative out there after Reader was closed, and I eventually settled on CommaFeed. It's pretty close to what Reader was, it's actively developed and it's open source. You can even host it yourself if you prefer. Some of the alternatives are good, but they all seemed to lack something or other. One feature I particularly wanted was good usability on both the desktop and mobile (which CommaFeed achieves). I'm pretty happy with it.
Tried Feedly for several months but the persistent crashes on Android were too much. Sort of replaced by increased twitter usage and flipboard.
Swapped to Feedly and kept going as before.
I do use Noscript and Google Analytics (in my NS untrusted list) seems to be on most pages on the net.
I doubt running GA on a page gives Google the same level of information that they would have captured using Google Reader.
Reader is my ideal solution and replacement.
I made a smooth and easy transition from Google Reader to Feedly, and that worked well. It's a very efficient way of getting through my news and blogs. Then I discovered that ownCloud (http://owncloud.org) has a built in RSS feeder. I use ownCloud on my Linode to provide a Dropbox like environment, plus my own Calendar and Contacts for my iPhone and iPad, plus bookmarks. I am currently working on replacing Evernote with ownCloud.
I already had a cloud installation with Linode, and I just added ownCloud to it. Then I started discovering all the extra stuff it can do. The RSS Feeder was a wonderful discovery. I lose the economy of scale that Feedly provides, but it works more closely to my mental model, and some of the formatting is nicer than Feedly. I've been using it for several months now, and totally love it. It's not for everyone, given the requirements (you have to set up your own webserver, then set up the ownCloud services), but the benefits are enormous. And I get a little more privacy, just me and Linode and the NSA.
this. inoreader is a nice no frills replacement. i dont care about social integration - i just want my rss feed in an easily readible format.
Then you must be doing something wrong and/or have a device issue. Never had Feedly crash.
I gotta say I tried all the suggestions after GR died. Feedly and The Old Reader were among the top recommended but still fell short in one area or another. Then I found Newsblur which does basically everything I could want, and the android app is great too.
The thing that was seriously useful was Google Listen that took podcasts from Reader. I have found nothing that does podcasts as well as Listen did.
I currently use Pocket Casts and it is adequate.
I tried Feedly but found it very demanding. If I left it, I would be told about the number of new things and it was just too much hassle. I will probably go back from time to time and clear the huge amount of "new" items and see how it goes for a while.
Dropping Reader was not a great thing for us "users" out here but I'm sure it made sense to someone at Google. However, I have No Agenda...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I learned my lesson and realized I had to roll my own so I am now using fever and it works just fine. I also realized it was rather foolish to trust google for any services they provide and have begun the tedious process of divesting / replacing [ google voice was the among the first to go ].
I thought I would miss Google Reader, but NewsBlur (see http://newsblur.com/) has been a great replacement, and has actually improved my workflow.
Never user Google reader, but I had pretty big iGoogle homepage set up with ~12 RSS feeds.
Swapped to ighome.com and never looked back.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.news.rssfeedreader
I do use Noscript and Google Analytics (in my NS untrusted list) seems to be on most pages on the net.
Yep.
I doubt running GA on a page gives Google the same level of information that they would have captured using Google Reader.
What do you think they were capturing there? I'd imagine it to be pretty much the same information. They just want to know what you're reading.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GReader shutting down is what lead me to try out Tiny Tiny RSS.
If you are already running a webserver for something else, it is pretty easy to set up your own personal RSS reader.
I had stopped using Google Reader (and RSS in general) about a year or so before Google killed reader. Hell, blame me for it getting killed. I found that I really only wanted info from about 8 sites and it wasn't that hard to just go check them. With RSS I tended to add subscriptions to too many things and then just the act of marking them all read (let alone actually reading them) was wasting too much time on crap.
Netvibes has been a nice drop-in replacement for me.
I've been mostly pleased with Feedly and I even pay them the $5 per month that I and thousands of other's offered to pay Google to keep Reader alive. My motivation is split between an appreciation for a smooth migration of my feeds and decent product and, honestly, partly out of spite that Google would not take my money. Assuming the 24K number is correct and all of those users are on the same plan (do they have more than one plan?), that represents nearly $1.5 million dollars per year, if my math is correct. It still puzzles me why Google wouldn't accept this direct funding and keep Reader going.
"Google Reader was merely the most popular 'client' app"
Yeah, done people were dead focused in the client functionality just like you. Real RSS consumers only cared about the server features:
1. Administer and consolidate all your feeds (even Yahoo pipes) into a single place.
2. You connect with your preferred client (web, PC, mobile)
3. Read and sync back status
4. Connect from another client and it only shows unread articles
I don't read news/blog sites without an RSS Feed, much less I install apps for specific sites. It would be impossible to remember to visit all those websites or open all those apps.
And about those social sites..... they are toooooooo social. Too much noise and too little facts for my taste. Really, not interested in what you got for breakfast.
Returning to the apps...the GReader website and app were nice, but there was nice competition to select from. I never used them. I only used the backend.
Now that they suspended the backend service there are other alternatives. I use Feedly with Press in my Android devices, because the Feedly app looks like a freaking magazine. Too much candy and too little facts again. The content is sparse and it is difficult to keep track of what feeds I have visited and which one not. Hard to see number of unread articles per feed, hard to flag read on lyrics with lame headlines. Their app, just like all the magazine oriented apps like Pulse, Current, etc. are made for the same type of casual readers that social networks aim for. The audience is different, so the solution must be different.
I guess that I might look for an alternative to serious, dense, efficient news sources once RSS feeds dissappear, but looks that this is not happening yet. ;-)
I know some PHP so I wrote a reader that lives on my own server. It's very simple but it does exactly what I want it to. It has a problem with character encodings -- lots of things (curly quotes, em- and en-dashes) come in as '?'s -- but other than that, it's fine. Works for me.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
GR was one of my favourite web apps. Since its demise I have switched two to alternatives. On Windows at the office I find RSS Owl generally works really well. A little laggy from time to time (I have about 50 feeds) but it mostly works. On *nix I have recently started using Newsbeuter (fuckin' awful name). Configuration is done simply by adding feed URL's to a text file. Pretty bare-bones, gets cranky when attempting to open two instances at the same time, and seems to crash randomly. I dig it but would be happy with a different comand-line alternative.
Article titles without the crap. I use Bazqux with Feedler on ios. Works great, however feature development seems a little stale. Couldn't completely import my Google takeout, specifically starred articles. There was a fix said to be coming, so I subscribed $$ but it never did.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
While everybody else is busy missing the point and showing off their favourite alternatives (I'm happy with Feedly BTW), there's a different data point I took out of TFS:
15 million users and 24,000 paying customers
That section alone is what interests me: the ratio of paying customers to total users. That's because I'm green enough in the field of business that I have no clue at all about these things, not even as anecdotes.
I don't usually read BI (because my perception of them is that they're BS, even though I don't have enough data points to support my perception), but this one made for an interesting article. From the article I got this other data point: If all 24,000 customers pay at least $45 per year, that means Feedly and its 12 employees are generating more than $1 million per year. and the fact that they were pushed near profitability. Nowhere does it say they are actually profitable. It's a good read for anybody who thinks of starting anything up and want their motivation, hopes and dreams crushed by hard reality numbers :)
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
I read this article on commafeed, which is the I switched to after overly complicated and disconcerting experiences on feedly and the oldreader. If anyone is simply looking for a perfect copy with no new/added functionality beyond what reader had, I think commafeed is the best, but I only use it on my desktop, so that's all I can speak to.
I originally went to Netvibes, which tries to offer RSS as some sort of secondary service to some business analytics aggregation or something (I never fully understood.) But sometime around the beginning of the year they did a moderate layout change and then completely ignored the vast number of user complaints (a help thread, with almost 200 comments when most had 3, was marked "completed" with no change or solid comment from staff). It introduced a ton of useless whitespace and, most importantly for me, broke their Mosaic view, which was great for images and the primary reason I chose them after Reader's shut down.
Once they proved they didn't care about user interaction and had to have their vision, I jumped ship along with a ton of others (HINT HINT BETA). I now use NewsBlur and am fairly happy with it. Their free service is pretty limited, but I found it useful enough to be worth the $2/mo for a subscription once I changed the settings to get rid of all their Web 2.0 stuff. I miss having "pages" to allow for larger grouping and any kind of image-oriented feed option, but I have a lot more flexibility in how I view things (and I can sort by time descending, something NetVibes was never able to do!)
My news reading habits are exactly the same as they used to be, but the recent feedly improvements have smoothed out the experience for me. While it wasn't as good as google reader when I first made the switch, there were a ton of improvements that have made it better than google reader was for my purposes.
I manually got my news by actually looking at sites before. The death of Google Reader and subsequent shilling by competitors made me decide on using Feedly, and since then I can't live without an RSS feed.
In addition to Twitter not having/allowing RSS feeds of their streams, up until about a year ago, they actually offered their own RSS feeds. Then they decided to stop offering them. I thought I had read that there's some workaround if you have a Twitter account, but I never got around to signing up for a Twitter account, so instead I just don't read Twitter very often anymore. Although, it occurs to me that my RSS reader (Liferea) has an option for running a website through a local program before attempting to parse it as RSS, so I could probably write a parser for Twitter's normal web interface... I should look into that.
1) I took all the feeds (>4000) out of google reader, and bookmarked them
2) Since then I've been slowly merging my bookmarks into a sqlite database, which I then pull from daily.
It's possible that feedly or some other online service might be able to help me...but after Reader shut down I've become pretty paranoid about using online services for those sorts of things; I'd rather have something that runs local(and my computer for the past year has not been capable of running pretty much anything else...ram has been at a premium). Also it's coloured my perception of Google itself: that was really the turning point between "using google services if they add value to my life/make life easier" and "PRISM-breaking my life, including a departure from any contact point with google I can live without without *too* much discomfort"
It took me 8 months to get everything to the point where it could be reached again and I've been trying to find a life balance that works ever since. I've really struggled -- google made it easy to get just the right amount of information about the world, every day. Generally if I read *all* of my RSS feeds for a day, I was bored or something else was wrong. Now there's really no boundary between "too much" and what I read daily. Consequently...sure I read ~95 feeds/day...but that's way too much time for what value it adds to my life.
So tl; dr I'm paranoid, ignorant and constantly busy now that I do a fraction of what I used to do with reader, only by hand.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Blogtrottr https://blogtrottr.com/
-Email is accessible on all my devices, don't need to install yet another app and don't have to worry about compatibility issues because email is already everywhere.
-They do real-time feeds, which allows me to get get service outage notifications that are only available via RSS to the work pager address *cough* salesforce*cough*
-I can give different sites different priorities. Some sites I read every day, others I only want to check once a week.
Most readers are purely chronological, so I'm forced to ready everything all the time.
-I can delete what I've read, so I don't have to keep stumbling over the same thing and I can easily save what I want forever.
-My email provider [Fastmail.fm] has an option to automatically delete emails in folders after so many days, which keeps things from getting out of hand.
-They support half-day and daily digests (in addition to realtime), so I am only getting sidetracked reading slashdot once a day without having to worry about missing something.
-Did I mention it's free?
The only thing that's changed is that I've made a point of getting away from free services and moving over to for-pay services with revenue streams that I understand, since I know they won't disappear in a year or two when they fail to successfully monetize their users or decide it's not worth it any more. Plus, I know how they're monetizing me: I'm putting cash directly into their pockets, without any of the funny business involving targeted ads, opting me in to stuff against my wishes, or selling my data to other companies.
Feedbin is the RSS reader to use. I tried Feedly, but it didn't allow .opml exports of feeds, and the last thing I wanted to do was lock myself into a new service right after leaving the last one. Feedbin is snappy, regularly updated with nice enhancements, and can be accessed from a number of clients. Absolutely love it, and the price is pretty good too.
I also switched from Gmail to FastMail. Again, it's a case of knowing where the money is coming from and getting more control over how my data is being used as a result. It's been a great change so far, and I've had far less issues using it once I got it all set up.
Google Reader was the only reason to be logged in to Google on my normal browser (like a lot of people, I use a separate browser for Gmail, Facebook, and the other companies that exist to track your browsing habits) Now I use tt-rss, and Google have no idea which links I click any more.
I don't find that Feedly is very good at updating my feeds. Sometimes days go by before it updates my feeds.
I've also tried Feeder and that seems to suffer from similar issues.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Never had it crash, but never had it update my feeds properly either
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
While some might run away in horror at the mention of the name AOL Reader, which has been around for a while now.. is pretty great.
It was recently updated and the ad bar was removed, the software is much quicker and with the fact it is not an independent business project like Feedly, or Inoreader.. there is no upselling!
I tried feedly, it was pushing the upsell too hard and the product didn't feel very useful in its 'free' state... ( https://feedly.com/ )
I tried Inoreader and its free product was much better than the feedly one, but its interface felt slow and clunky compared to what I wanted ( http://www.inoreader.com/ )
I tried DIGG Reader but it was so minimal and featureless that I barely went a week of using it before moving on ( http://digg.com/reader )
I also used TinyTinyRSS locally for a good 6 months and while it is quite good, and the only data I'm revealing to others is that i fetched their feed..maintaining the thing is something of a pain that never comes up with other places. ( http://tt-rss.org/redmine/proj... )
As of right now I am back to using AOL Reader as my main RSS feed reader... It is fast, the design is good enough for me.. no upselling ...the feature set is just enough to allow me to do what I did on google reader, and not overload.. and they seem to be actively working on making it better ( https://reader.aol.com/ )
There's no reason for it to go away. So yeah, I use feedly, and other than that I use a client.
Not having google reader has actually enabled me to take my rss reading habits out of the hands of companies that like to keep track of people's habits. I use an open source reader now, and I didn't have to give up my name or email address in order to do so. A good change, I'd say. And I follow more rss feeds than ever before.
Yes, i still use RSS and created my own (http://linksdv.com/reader/) hard but i feel better without Google in my back
Newsblur has been more than fine for my RSS feeds. Fast, non-douche based (meaning he’s not going to mine the info and sell it) ownerlove it.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I just gave up, and read the following things /.
email
metafilter
boingboing
facebook
youtube
doc searls web log
and that's it. The internet was nice while it lasted.
Damn, time flies. When they took it down, I was really pissed. I tried other readers, but eventually realized reddit was a better option. I just subscribe to subreddits that might carry the content I want instead of to the feeds directly, this means news from the all the sources I want are aggregated, but by users that filter the content for me. Much better experience.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
GPL. Nuff Said.
Liberty.
Shortly after the death of Google Reader I made the switch to https://feedbin.com/feedbin, which while it was a paid service was just as speedy almost all the features.
While it was a shame that GReader shut-down, the RSS scene is definitely more competitive and far healthier than what it was while GReader was around.
Does anyone have a clue what happened to it?
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
RSS is so much bigger then one stupid feed aggregator. To strat with there has to be dozens and dozens of aggregators. Secondly I am a huge user of RSS and I have never used a feed aggregator. Almost every website I make pulls in some content via RSS and/or makes its content available via RSS. My podcatcher uses RSS and I subscribe to feeds manually that I know already know about. I reject with prejudice the very idea that one aggregator going away would have any impact at all on RSS usage.
I went and found a reader that did everything google reader did, with a similar UI - boringly named "the old reader", as in "bring back the old Reader!" (I tried a few that advertised that's what they were going for - theoldreader got it the most right at the time), ported all my stuff to it, and have since completely forgotten about Google's fail in that area.
Let's not forget two other nice news aggregators. There's the venerable Flipboard, and a newcomer called Circa. Flipboard draws from all internet news sources including RSS.