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."

Re: simply put:

[Anonymous Coward]

no, and i am a bit more hesitant to jump onto any Google bandwagon that come along.

The Old Reader

[jrq]

The Old Reader (http://theoldreader.com/ [theoldreader.com]) works pretty well for me. Not quite as sophisticated or instantly speedy as Google was, and it can take a few more minutes to be up-to-date, but free and you can import your feeds, which you had already exported from Google Reader, right?

Roll your own with TT-RSS

[ppz003]

GReader shutting down is what lead me to try out Tiny Tiny RSS [tt-rss.org].

If you are already running a webserver for something else, it is pretty easy to set up your own personal RSS reader.

Re:It was nice

[tlambert]

I still miss it. Surely the data harvesting would have been worth it, for a behemoth like Google to just keep it running.

I use Feedly, but it's not the same.

The problem was the API let people write clients that removed the value to Google of running the service (i.e. the advertisements).

Google was willing to give the code over to any third party who wanted to commit to supporting it, and even host it on Google's infrastructure, if they were paid to do so, but there wasn't any way to monetize it, given the API split and the ad stripping by the clients of the API. Apparently stream bookmarking and privacy weren't worth sitting through the ads to anyone, as no one was able to come up with a viable business model that kept the good stuff, but was still able to be monetized enough to at least break even.

But hey, I'll happily join you to complain about stuff I no longer get free, too, if that will make you feel better, like those game cards you could get at Chick-fil-a in the mall, go down to the Walden Books, look up the answers in the almanac, and then go back to Chick-fil-a for the free food item because you got the right answer, and get the next game card.