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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."
InoReader lets me do all the same things I did with Reader, with the added bonus of not providing Google more user data.
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 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.