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."

Comments

Feedly: Google Reader Reloaded

[bigdady92]

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.

Another Feedly user

[Geeky]

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.

ownCloud

[hgriggs]

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.