So, how are we going to replace Google Reader?

I use Feedly and I’m very happy with it, Fred. Plus, they’ve been anticipating this for a while, so they’ve been working on an in-house API to replace Reader and are promising a “seamless” transition. We all know what promises are worth in the tech world, of course, but they seem pretty confident. I’m hoping it means I don’t even have to export my Reader settings (which I never, ever, EVER look at).

I looked at feedly and didn’t like the interface, finding it slow to work, and counter intuitive. The Old Reader finally got my feeds imported and I think it’s going to be my solution. It took them a few days to get my import done, but since their user base has quadrupled I consider that reasonable.

Feedly has been working out very well for me; its default arrangement is a little too “tablety” for me, but it has plenty of settings to adjust to one’s own liking

I’ve been using Feedly as well, and it’s been working well. There are some ways the mobile app could be better – having an option to display older items first, for example – but otherwise it’s quite nice, and the browser-based version can be configured to act similarly to Google Reader. (In particular I use the titles view, unread-only, oldest first.)

Another voice praising Feedly. I’m actually finding I like Feedly’s interface better than Google Reader’s.

You can sign in to Feedly using your Google Reader account, and all of your subscriptions and organization will automagically already be there.

Right now, it’s just acting as a front end for your existing GR account, but Feedly has promised that they’ll transition users over to their own in-house platform when GR shuts down.

I also follow Fred and all my other favorite blogs on Reader and I am Not Pleased about having it taken away. Google and Disqus are both on my list. Speaking of which, is there any news from Disqus that indicates that they’re considering returning some choice to users or are they digging in and basically giving us the ol’ “bite me”?

About Reader alternatives, most of the mourning Reader users who I know are going to either Feedly or Old Reader. I’ve played around with both of them a little, but haven’t come to a decision*, so I’ll be interested to see what other people have to say about this.

*I’m a procrastinator, especially about involuntary change, so it’s pretty much a given that I won’t decide until June 28th at the earliest.

Another for Feedly. They are really taking this opportunity and running with it. I installed the extension “just to try it out” and haven’t logged in to Reader since.

Disqus ate my post :-/

To recap what I said (I don’t feel like typing the whole post again), I’m using Feedly: better looking, more prone to lag, overall seamless transition.

I’ve installed the app on my Android phone and it works well for me so far.

I joined The Old Reader a week ago and love it. It’s definitely one of the smaller readers (or was, before this happened), and apparently it’s run by just 3 people, so there are some updating and loading issues. However, they’re working their asses off to get on top of the mass influx of new users and are really listening to our suggestions/complaints and taking everything to heart. I have very high hopes for this!

Plus, the layout is very close to “classic” Google Reader and is one of the easiest out there to use.

I switched to Feedly a couple of months ago and I love it. It’s generally a better reading experience, especially on mobile devices. However, managing subscriptions is not quite as easy as in Google Reader.

Google Reader is my backend for Feedly and Flipboard. Luckily, both services have announced contingency plans. Never used it directly—just as a storage device, really.

Sigh

I’ve been a Google reader user since the beginning of the service. I spend hours on it every day.

I can’t help but wonder if that’s part of the problem – Google tends to measure activity by ‘clicks’, but Reader is so useful and awesome that I never felt the need to click away!

I’ll be making the decision on where to migrate to in a month or so, once we’ve had a chance to see how the feed sites are handling their user influxes.

I’m hopeful about The Old Reader; I queued my Google Reader subscriptions for import Sunday evening, and am still in the queue with over 22,000 users ahead of me (almost halfway there from where I started), but the ones I’ve added manually work fine. It’s missing some bells and whistles (like keypad plus/minus to change the font size), but it’s usable.

Unfortunately, there’s no dedicated Android reader, but it seems to work acceptably in the Android web browser.

Apparently Digg is trying to step up to fill the void left by Google, and they’re taking feature suggestions.

Other than that, I have no helpful suggestions, as I’ve never made much use of newsreaders.

As for Disqus, I’m kind of annoyed that while they’ve come out with an app for Windows Phone 8, it doesn’t allow you to login via Facebook, so it does me no good, as I have no idea what my original login information was. I suppose I could try the “forgot password” link, as I’m reasonably certain what e-mail account I used, but I’m not 100% certain that’s linked to this profile. Oh well.

I never got into Google Reader because I didn’t like the interface, but I have been using Feedly for 2-3 years and love it. I have heard from some GR fans that they do not like the interface because it is more picture based. I prefer it for that reason, but people obviously have different preferences. On iOS I have been using Newsify instead of the Feedly app. I like that as well.

The Old Reader looks passable on a web browser but appears to have no ability to sync to other devices.

Feedly looks okay on a web browser (if you alter its default settings; the default settings are awful). Its android app is utterly unusable. And it uses Google Reader to sync across devices, so it’s is going to stop working on July 1 unless they come up with a replacement for the back-end.

Newsblur costs money, which isn’t necessarily a problem for me, but its crippleware version is so crippled I refuse to even try it. 12 feeds isn’t enough for me to know whether I can live with this product; I have hundreds and hundreds of subscriptions.

I’m desperately holding out hope that Google will change their minds due to popular demand, or else open-source what they’ve got instead of dropping it down the oubliette.

I’ve looked at Feedly, NewsBlur, and The Old Reader, and I think I’m going with the latter. It allows you to import your feed list of subscriptions, and it was explicitly designed to keep some of the features of an earlier version of Google Reader. It doesn’t have a mobile version, but I do the vast majority of my RSS reading either on a PC or in the browser of my Kindle Fire anyways.

I’m not in a rush to get there, though. I’ll migrate sometime in June.

The Old Reader looks good, but it’s classified as a Social Networking site by one of the reputable categorization services, so it might as well be facebook as far as the work firewall is concerned.

I’ve looked. There is literally no proper substitute for Google Reader. They’re either oriented toward the App-driven “magazine-style” interface which becomes totally unusable if you follow more than a handfull of feeds and is really only designed for picture-heavy-content-light stuff (THIS is basically the bane of the tech age. Everying is increasingly designed to give you an enriched experience that makes it utterly impossible to absorb information quickly, even as the amount of information available grows exponentially). Nothing, and I mean NOTHING other than reader is really designed to follow feeds like this blog’s comments feed. I shelled out for a subscription to NewsBlur, and it’s about as close to the functionality of Reader as you can get, but it’s got some issues. First, it’s crippled unless you pay. Second, it’s a bit flaky. It’s consistently lost track of which articles I’ve read, and occasionally, it will decide that one of my subscribed feeds has moved to a new URL and just switch it over for my convenience. By which I mean that for no clear reason, it just replaces one of MY feeds with some other more popular feed, such as deciding that Doonesbury is actually an Ubuntu tips and tricks blog now. And it’s down quite a lot. I suspect some or all of these problems are down to the fact that several million people are looking for a Reader replacement all at once. Finally, its UI has a bit of Counterproductive Cleverness. Like it tries ot mark articles read based on you passing your mouse pointer OVER them instead of clicking. And you can’t scroll with the arrow keys, since it overloads them to jump up and down in whole-article increments (So there’s no way to scroll an article which is longer than a page without using the mouse). Also, my son grabbed the right side of the keyboard and it hid all of my subscriptions and deleted all my saved articles.

And, just the be clear here, this is the best replacement I could find.

I’m in line (50254 and slowly ticking down in the import queue) to try out The Old Reader. Its lack of syncing or app support or whatever doesn’t matter to me, because I only use a desktop computer – can’t afford a smartphone, don’t own a tablet, so my unintended Luddism fits my needs in snugly with TOR’s service.

I’m still heavily in denial. I’m going to wait at least a month or so before I start trying out alternatives hoping that either a better option emerges out of the internet’s primordial ooze or the mandarins at Google come to their freaking senses.

On maybe three quarters of the blogs I follow, ranging in topics from politics to sports to technology to pictures of old crap there has been a similar post as this, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the death of our beloved Google Reader.

My only question is…WTF? I mean, seriously, WTF? I realize that Reader may be small potatoes in the grander Google ecosystem, but how does it make sense for any company to throw away a piece of business this popular and well-loved? Look at how many people are scrambling to pick up the refugees.

I may not be as smart as the Google guys, but I’m no dummy and I can’t see any way that this makes any sense at all.

I switched to NetVibes for a Google Reader replacement – as I noted in my reply to EllieMurasaki, my one complaint about it is that I prefer to read oldest first, and it insists on giving me newest first. With the option for Twitter and weather widgets, it simultaneously replaces iGoogle and Reader for me.

I did eventually figure out how to make New Disqus switch between oldest first and newest first – except that the threaded discussion means “newest” isn’t necessarily “newest”. It doesn’t work for this site (or, I suppose, any site where discussions can be going on four or five days after a post…) I’ve noticed that not all blogs on Patheos use Disqus – are there other options to explore?

I am still in denial, though I am trying to switch to the Old Reader. I see eye-to-eye with Fred on Google Reader. I still believe the Disqus update was a good thing. I have no need for browser apps; I use different browsers all the time.

…and their support team says they’re “working on” Oldest First.

My work IE seems to sometimes decide pages need to be loaded in Compatibility View even when they don’t (another problem with new Disqus!). It’s not always consistent even on the same page – if it barfs on New Disqus, reloading it once or twice will usually make it work.

They want to put their emphasis on Google+, a platform they control completely. They don’t control RSS/Atom. That’s the short version. Google has lots its original mission.

Yeah, netvibe’s lack of user-controlled sort ordering was the dealbreaker for me. Coming home and opening up the rss feed for THIS PLACE and fining 100 articles in the wrong order?

Also, the thing is so squishy and Web 3.0 that it’s hard to use.

One of the links Fred gave up above had this quote on why people used Reader, and why none of the substitutes actually substitute:

Serious RSS users aren’t into it for the luscious jpegged beauty. RSS
feeds, taken straight, are a wall of text. That’s useful when you want
to let news wash over you, to scan screenfuls of headlines without
waiting for extraneous pictures to load. When I want to absorb a lot of
information fast–which is to say, always–I don’t have time for
Flipboard. I want exactly what Google will be taking away from me this
summer.