Google Reader is dead; long live Feedly?

[dougo]

On March 13, Google announced they were shutting down Google Reader on July 1. It was hidden as the fifth entry in a laundry list of things they were closing down; unlike most of the other bullets in that list, they did not offer any suggestion for an alternative service to use, instead just mentioning that you could extract your Google Reader data via Google Takeout (which is basically like evicting you by dumping all your belongings out a third story window onto the street below).

Several others feed readers started working on (or accelerating work on) services to migrate your data from Google Reader. I looked into Newsblur, The Old Reader, and Hive (nee HiveMined), but I eventually settled on Feedly.

I'll admit that I didn't do an exhaustive study of these (and there are probably lots of others that I didn't even try), but Feedly feels like the best replacement for what I want out of a feed reader, and specifically for what I want out of a transition from Google Reader. I was most concerned about losing all my Starred Items, because it seemed like none of the new readers had the ability to import them—or would only import the URLs, instead of the cached full articles, which was important because some of mine are over four years old and no longer exist at their original URLs. Once I noticed that Feedly had in fact kept the entire set of articles intact, I felt safe committing to the switch. Also, both the Chrome extension and the Android app have the basic features that I want: compact view, oldest-first sorting, keep unread, save for later.

Unfortunately there doesn't yet seem to be a good export capability from Feedly (ironically). I'm just going to have to cross my fingers and hope that they add this before they go under, or get bought by Google and shut down, or whatever fate is eventually in store for them...

Comments

[rfrancis]

Feedly's been around a goodly while; I was using them well before the announcement. The backend's new, of course, but seems to be going well so far. And now they've got a web-based app (although they also have a Firefox extension, happily.)

They used to be very dedicated to a certain magazine-ish layout and it was a giant pill, but the Google Reader flap convinced them that it would be good to start catering to the GR veterans more and so things have improved hugely in that area since.

I found a reference where they say they'll have OPML export in/by July, so there's that. I agree I wish they had it, like, now, but oh well. Probably spending all their time on the backend and web app...

Another thing that's cool is that a number of services are using their backend (well, cool as long as it stays going.) Point being, for example, the app I used to use with Google Reader, gReader, is going to stay alive by using Feedly's backend as a partnership, so even if Feedly gets dumb with layout stuff again... options. I have high hopes.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the fact that the Feedly Cloud is a platform with an open API makes me think that export will be pretty easy. And really, more important to me than any particular UI choice is just to have all my feed state in the cloud and accessible.

[lordjulius.livejournal.com]

I started using Feedly too, though I didn't use any special features of Google Reader. Basically I just needed something that would display articles from all the sources I've singled out for reading in chronological order. Feedly does that, but even after several months of use its UI still aggravates me. Like if you hover your cursor over the left control area it rolls out a little window that then obscures text. Little things.

I guess I'm a cranky old fart now.