Google Reader: One Year Later 132
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."
Feedly: Google Reader Reloaded (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I don't miss Google Reader. I use InoReader now (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:I don't miss Google Reader. I use InoReader now (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Tiny Tiny RSS (Score:5, Informative)
TT-RSS is so simple; most anyone comfortable enough to do self-hosting can set it up I'd think. Only issues I ever had compared to Reader were, at the beginning, it'd sometimes get temporarily banned on certain RSS feeds for excessive queries (probably numerous users all set up on DH so it was seeing that, as I only query once every four hours). Ironically this happened almost exclusively on Feedburner links (which Slashdot uses), which is owned by Google, so it sometimes felt like Google was really trying to kill RSS.
Also occasionally Dreamhost's database server can be rather slow (making the whole application slow), but that doesn't happen very often. And you sort of expect it with cheap shared hosting, anyway.
It certainly works plenty well enough, and since I already had the DH account for other purposes, adding TT-RSS was effectively free.