I know lots of folks are giving up on RSS readers now that Google is pulling the plug (any day now) on Google Reader. I’m still a regular reader of my feeds, though, and while I did not use Google Reader itself, the apps and sites (including Reeder on my Mac and Mr. Reader on my iPad) that I use tapped into Google Reader (a complicated business that I don’t quite understand well enough to even try to explain). Since the news came out about the death of Google Reader, I’ve been trying to figure out: what now?
I’ve tried out about a half-dozen RSS readers in the last few weeks, and it may be because we settle into routines so easily or something else, but none of them felt right to me. I have decided for now to use Feedly on my computers and am still alternating between Feedly and Mr. Reader on my iPad. (I was happy to see that Feedly allows other services to use its code, just as Google did for other apps, and so I was able to export and import my RSS feeds into Feedly and then set up Mr. Reader to borrow it from Feedly — which sounds like a big shell game, doesn’t it?).
Feedly has a nice feel and design flow to it. The migration of data from Google to Feedly was painless. I didn’t like it when I thought it was only a browser add-on, but the recent shift to a cloud-based web reader has me hooked. And the reader seems nice and quick. I am sure I will be fine. I have to admit, though, the whole experience had me reflecting on the value of reading my RSS and I determined that I still gain a lot of knowledge, connections and insights from the folks I follow, and I am not quite ready to give that up, even though Twitter and other places cover a lot of the same ground.
From my early days with Bloglines to my shift to Google Reader, and then into Reeder and Mr. Reader, and now into Feedly, my habits as a reader of RSS continue to evolve, and all of this reminds me that so much of the technology and tools that we take for granted (reading RSS in the morning over coffee, for example) in the hands of others, and if they (Google) want to kill a useful tool, there’s little we can do about it (unless you know how to build your own reader. I don’t)
Peace (in the feeds),
Kevin