I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was launched last Summer and I expect NewsBlur to be around for quite a while.
It's also fully open-source, in case you decide to build your own private community: http://github.com/samuelclay.
I also have a full-scale re-design in the works, but if you can't get to the main site you can try using the beta site: http://dev.newsblur.com
Google Reader is the core of my information diet. Not twitter. Thousands of blogs starred, liked, and commented. An interesting feature that you couldn't replace is automatic translation: reading a russian blog asmit was written in english. Once I shared one of its articles and one friend asked me if I knew russian or if it was a joke my share! Because obviously the share was in the original language.
Google is evil. While I can understand a business decision, there are ways to hand it over to other companies or organizations.
I share some of my previous criticism:
- Extraction of Main Text Content Using the Google Reader NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/
-Google Search NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/
- The Data Portability Fact Sheet: http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/
- Reverse Engineering and the Cloud: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-a...
Sad to see it go.
What do you guys recommend for replacement? I know about NewsBlur [1], but I never liked it that much.
I think I'm just looking for something that would emulate Reader's full-screen view as close as possible.
edit: Here's what I consider an absolute must-have in RSS app:
- complete navigation with keyboard (j/k preferred)
- full screen mode (really, I don't need a sidebar of a fixed header all the time)
- feed view (not just list of items, show me excerpts!)
And I know I may be the weird one, but I really, really dislike readers that try to show me items directly from feeds webpage. I find it jarring and distracting when I have five totally different layouts flash before my eyes within 10 seconds (I skim headlines and then skip most of items in my feed).
And for the love of god, please, please, no goddamn 'WE LEARN WHAT YOU LIKE' or any kind of bullshit 'smart selection'. I selected my feeds myself, I can manage them just fine by myself, just get out of my way, please.
That's because there was almost ZERO innovation done on this product. Very few (mostly visual) improvements, and very few new features. The latest posts on Google Reader blog are from 2011 http://googlereader.blogspot.com/
I'm sure there's more engagement with Reader than Plus, with its millions of users who don't really use it (many of whom aren't even really aware that they are signed up for it).
Later edit: Like many other will most likely do in their replies I'm also going to suggest an alternative that I've tried in the past. http://theoldreader.com/
Later edit 2: They even added a nice pop-up now. https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.imm.io/Zg6A.png
With some luck it'd attract enough developers to keep the project alive. Or maybe somebody would figure out a way to monetize the effort. Either option, it'd be much better than just let the service die.
It's not unprecedented. Google did exactly this with Google Wave.
Sadly, I don't think this will ever happen. This project is too small to justify the resources needed to clean up the code and solve any dependencies. And, differently than Chromium / Android / Google Wave, Google Reader is not a platform / protocol / OS. It's just yet-another pet project for a company that - sooner or later - has to justify its investment to Wall Street.
This isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, product that Google creates just to later destroy it, when it discover it has no business or economic justification.
Keep this in mind when developing for Mirror API, or anything else that is not core for the company.
This news is really rubbing me the wrong way; I've been a long-time Google customer, even a 'Google hipster' as my friends would say. I'm an early-adopter that often beta tests. I was the only one at work with GMail when it was released, and was always out of invites that first year. Same for GVoice (which I've had since GrandCentral), GWave, Apps for personal domains, and Chrome (where I've posted many bug reports that were accepted).
I've been with Reader since the year it came out, though I never used any other RSS reader -- I'd tried several, but they all sucked; Reader was just a breath of fresh air, "cloud" based before that was even a buzzword, and I've introduced many a friend to its wonderful utility. My favorite feature was the _'note in reader'_ bookmarklet, which they killed in favor of crappy G+, but now they're going to outright kill the entire product?
My only hope, if they don't grant a stay of execution, will be that they open-source the code such as they did with Wave. At least then I'll have some hope of retaining my most-used web app of all time.
From your 117 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 398 items, clicked 189 items, starred 7 items, and emailed 0 items.
Since October 26, 2010 you have read a total of 20,685 items.
Needless to say, I use this app 10x more than any other, including email (edit: ok I might be exaggerating).
Also, it looks like the Google Operating System (unofficial blog) recognized the distress signals back in December with "Google Reader, 'Constantly on the Chopping Block'"[1].
Where's my pitchfork...
1. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-reader-const...
It's not ready yet, but I thought I might as well toss up a launchrock page and collect email addresses from other folks who might be interested: http://signup.viafeeds.com
Here are my guiding principles:
1. It's going to cost money. I refuse to 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.' I imagine that for more casual users, this'll be a nominal amount. I won't compromise on this because....
2. I want to build something sustainable, and have it be enough of a profit center for me that I'm willing to focus on it and continually improve it for years to come.
3. I want to build something that I'll love more than Google Reader. I spend at least an hour a day in Google Reader, and want to make sure that whatever I build has the simplicity of Reader.
I have a lot of interesting ideas I want to try out around inclusion of contextual information and the ability to easily save or share articles or clips of articles in multiple ways. From conversations I've had with friends in the journalism world, there's a real need for a product like this, especially one with a legitimate business model.
Regarding where this fits in relative to NewsBlur: I think NewsBlur is doing a lot of interesting stuff, but it feels heavyweight to me, compared to Google Reader. I want a very minimalistic, "just the facts, ma'am" experience.
What do you want to see in a news feed product? Where do you think Google Reader could've or should've been in 2013 if Google had properly maintained it?
Anyway, to reiterate, if you're interested, head over here and enter your email address: http://signup.viafeeds.com (I just created the domain an hour ago, so hopefully it'll have propagated to your DNS server).
Good news for the competition, anyway: Google Reader being pretty good yet completely free and not (obviously) monetized occupied a lot of that space, which is now freed up.
edit: In fact, I see NewsBlur is completely unresponsive now, presumably due to sudden interest.
White House Petition!
What I'd really like to see here on HN is a post comparing other RSS contenders like NewsBlur and The Old Reader.
It is my most accessed browser URL.
It is the primary method I peruse new stuff on the web.
It is the only RSS app that can handle my volume of RSS subscriptions (all others choke and sputter once the feed total is greater than a couple hundred).
Wasn't a big brouhaha about windows phone only supporting Exchange protocol and not the open standard that's used by everyone: CalDAV? Oh, and now Google is discontinuing it! Let's see how much longer Exchange will last...
Code Search, Google Search API (twice), Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary.
Friends don't let friends rely on free web services.
I will never trust Google again.
Apparently the only Google service I don't have a good alternative for is Google Books (for search; kindle, torrented bookwarez, and scribd works fine for the raw PDFs)
It just goes to show, if you're using Google software that has no advertising and isn't used to sell advertising, it could end any day, and it probably will some day.
I'll be purchasing a Feedafever license, which also happens to work with Reeder. http://www.feedafever.com/
I guess it's time to start searching for a new RSS reader. Too bad that I already did it a while ago, and every time I went back to Google Reader.
The biggest problem for me with other feed reader is that they try to add too many features to the simple format that RSS is. No, I don't care about "hot news", and I don't care about "suggested stories", I just want to read the feed I've added to it. My brain is good enough to skim through that list by just reading the title.
And most other reader lack integration with a mobile platform (Android/iOS/WP). Yes, sometimes they have a mobile client, but usually not nearly good enough as 3rd party clients.
Hopefully they'll change their mind, but I doubt it. Time to force myself. Sigh.
So is getting updates from people and projects you care about really such a niche thing? Have I missed some other huge channel that supersedes RSS? Or are we about to actually lose something profound here?
Kudos to Newsblur, which I never heard of before today. I'd like to sign up for a paying membership, but it seems like this is exactly what everyone else is doing, so servers are dead...
The worst part is how the big guys kill all competition with their free products leaving few alternatives for users.
Of ALL the things they would shut-down, they have to kill Reader!?? Nooooooooooooo!! Aaargggghhhh....
Oh well, guess it's back to RSSOwl[1]. Maybe this will even motivate me to get involved in hacking on RSSOwl a bit and help those guys out.
This will probably also serve as the impetus for me to start adding some Reader like features to Neddick[2]. That was always sort of in the back of my mind, so why not go ahead and jump on it?
[1]: http://rssowl.org/
I remember at the end of college and right after (I graduated in 2008), many of my close friends were on GReader and we would share and communicate directly through it about interesting things we were reading. It was an awesome way to interact, and nothing has replaced it for my group and me. Google's implicit (although I could be reading their intentions incorrectly) strategy of trying to route that interaction through GPlus did not work for us. Too much overhead and it never materialized. Now we just use email, which is fine. So on the whole it's a type of social interaction that has simply gone. It's a shame, because I think that Google could have done something with this. But they are just one company and the number of innovative things they're doing is really impressive.
Maybe this will clear the way for a competitor that replaces the social interaction component and innovates on it. I'd be a user for sure.
The only approach that I've seen to exporting stars is to use the fact that Reader will create a feed of just your starred items. Then you can view that feed in some other reader and manually mark each one there (ugh).
Edit: Oh, and the read/not read history is, AFAICT, also not exportable. And I do use this as well.
We promise to have all the basics of Google Reader covered, including importing your feed data (or as much as possible through the API).
Of course, if you're looking for something to move to immediately, NewsBlur is an awesome product :)
That will happen if you stop developing it and ignore requests for new features. Conesus has done a good job with Newsblur and I'll try going back to that, but I really wanted to have Gmail-style filtering of my RSS feeds in Google Reader, to to mention being able to maintain my sharing/tracking data within the Google ecosystem.
This is a major failure on Google's part. Complaining about a declining user base when the product was left to stagnate amounts to blaming the users for the company's lack of vision. Why Google would want to abandon this extremely rich source of behavorial data and trend emergence is beyond me; it suggests a loss of direction, for which short-term reactivity is no substitute. Put another way, you can't lead the herd by following it faster. I am shocked.
As I say, I've used Newsblur before and thought it OK - at the time I just somewhat preferred Reader's cosmetics. So the above is not just a reaction to the necessity to switch platforms.
I love offline clients, quite often I'm stuck in a remote location where 3G has yet to penetrate so I like to have a couple of hundred items to read which will sync when I reach connectivity again.
I need the RSS service to track what I've read across multiple devices and have the client support offline usage. Any recommendations?
I use Google Reader heavily, but I never go to the web pages. I have native apps on my desktop and mobile devices and just use Reader to keep my subscriptions synced.
No ad views, no service.
iReadG has been great because it will download all the rss feed data and allow me to browser it and star items without an Internet connection which is great for those times on the road when there is no signal. I have no idea what I'll be able to use to replicate this functionality now that Google Reader is going down.
Very very sad.
I've got YEARS of starred items "saved" in Reader. I use it everyday to stay abreast of news (1000+ items / day). Between Google Reader and iGoogle... Google has deprecated most of the tools I use on a regular basis. This makes me seriously question using Gmail and Apps for Business.
EDIT: Just RTFM'd. Looks like Google TakeOut will let me export most of the stuff I care about. Still, this sucks. I'll probably just keep using it and hope (like iGoogle) the deprecation date gets pushed back. Otherwise... productivity boon due to lack of RSS feeds.
Also.... Feedburner users should see the writing on the wall!
This is the first internet product shutdown I've ever been affected by.
Maybe I don't need to spend so much time reading up on random news. Who knows, it might be good for me.
But I will miss you.
anyway feedly has a replacement coming soon:
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/
> We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.
> If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlesly
It is an open source self hosted rss reader with a responsive skin. I'll be migrating tonight nad since it is open source I can contribute when I run into issues!
Any suggestions?
I think they made a quick short headed cost analysis in this, that archive and search functionality needs server power. Actual userbase does not provide enough money juice to balance.
Now, let the alternatives pour in.
I actually it daily but only through apps like Reeder.
Google killed with their free Reader the biggest part of the market around RSS. Switching off Reader opens up this market which should be still large enough for a few indies to find their niche. Maybe even reinvigorating RSS while doing so.
Adding on to this:
What he hell do I do with my starred items now, it's literally the best collection of content I have curated in my life and I reference it all the time.
edit: petition to keep it open http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-don-t-kill-goo...
Google has fallen very far.
http://tt-rss.org as a replacement seems the winner for me so far.
With Google Reader as an API devs had a way to get historical data on practically any RSS feed going back many years. That ability will be lost/gone forever. Even if Google sunsets the reader app, I wish they'd keep this data source open. Its hugely valuable and I don't think there is any alternative to it.
I think that having cached all this data on their server over the years of their own free will, they've put themselves to be in a position where they have a somewhat fiduciary responsibility of keeping this data alive and open.
I have swapped Delicious with Diigo (After shopping around many alternatives). I really hope the process of replacing Google reader isn't as long or as painful as that was.
The ending of Delicious and Google Reader is the end of an era of my use of the Internet. I wonder if it's a function of my age that I now see that as a sad and worrying development rather than an opportunity to be grasped.
No need to backup your feeds, it uses your google account for now.
Due Disclosure: Though I have no official connection to Prismatic, founder Bradford Cross is a friend and I am biased to Prismatic. It is awesome. Try it at http://getprismatic.com/
Edit: I think there's a 50/50 chance this decision gets reversed.
Edit: looks like http://feedly.com is going to get my vote for now.
--
[a] As long as your machine remains "yours", i.e. free of the same restrictions.
He's also very responsive to requests for features.
I don't know what I'm going to do about this. I guess the reality is that social won and RSS is dead. Or at least social is much more monetizable.
I've tried so many other different RSS aggregators but kept coming back to Google Reader. It worked well, had minimal fluff, and was fast.
R.I.P. Google Reader
I'm open to alternatives, but I haven't seen any I could really latch on to.
Google reader,of the RSS readers, you were the best, reliable, unencumbered by partisanship, unflavored by ideology. You were the best. Too bad, I must say goodbye, too bad I must go to newsbeuter or some other webreader, too bad you must die.
Truly I hate google, I hate what Google has become, I love the web, I love what the web was supposed to be. I love RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS and I will mourn you when you are gone.
I'm putting this out there in case anybody finds it useful. I made it years ago but never got around to promoting it. The idea was an online bookmarking app that tells you when the bookmarked pages have changed, and for technical reasons it eventually turned into a simple news feed reader.
It also supports drag and drop and for browsers with side bars (damn you Chrome!), it works... in the side bar.
I've moved onto other things but if you're really into it, get in touch and I'll try to move your data from Google Reader.
I think they announced this while the news cycle is wall-to-wall New Pope Mania to cover up this appalling summery execution :)
I'm dropping Google a note and offering to pay a subscription if they continue services. Probably won't make a dent, but worth a try.
Far if it costed too much, i bet people would be happy to fork out $10 a year for it?
I've been using it daily for the past 4 years, to be honest nothing comes that close to it, and most likely the majority of people who use RSS readers use Google Reader.
Also now most of the iOS/Android apps are fucked now since they all use Google Reader.
Tldr; Google are dongies.
Keep Reader alive and I'll CONSIDER using G+
Until then, I'm not going to touch you.
And there is no option to save this data. Or is there?
Edit/Update: I'm probably part of the problem. I never click ads - maybe they just had too many freeloaders like me? :) Weirdly, I also never block ads. I just don't click them.
I presume this death announcement doesn't meet the criteria for a HN black banner though.
I may reevaluate feed idea when I see intelligent reader that will show me early the most interesting stories from my subscriptions and will do it with a style. Reading must be a pleasure, not pain. Typographically web is a horrible place, there is so much that can and should be improved. Feeds should be your better (i.e. correctly) looking versions of the texts you can find on the web.
Google Reader Plus extension improved a bit comfort of using GR, thanks to multi-column view for instance, but it wasn't enough to keep me using GR.
This isn't a traditional email-inbox-style feed reader. It's like Flipboard for your feeds, on the web.
In beta - feedback warmly welcomed.
Also, very interested in talking to RSS fanatics.
I've been working on a news solution of my own, Scoopinion, since 2011. It's a discovery engine that ranks articles based on how closely they've been read. Users install a browser extension that lets them track their own reading (within a set of whitelisted sites). It's a little bit of quantified self for news. The data is used for recommendations and to help journalists in their work.
It's not a drop-in replacement for Reader since you don't get the full firehose of headlines from your feeds, only the most engaging stories.
I don't know why. It's a great eulogy for Reader, written in 2012.
Now I just have to wait for its servers to stop melting.
I've also been working on a similar news reader app called BlogRoll: http://blogrollapp.com
It can import your Google Reader feeds and has a tiled layout (which may not be everybody's cup of tea), but it works well for photo-focused sites like food and fashion blogs, and it handles other news sites and blogs quite well too.
Here's a screenshot of it: http://bit.ly/Yc1P9C
Every alternative I've seen so far in this hole topic(yes, all of them, I've tested all of them) is either poorly designed, bad UX, weird browser problems or trying too hard to be more then a RSS reader. Guess I'll just have to spend 2 days and build my own. Oh, well :)
Any alternative discussed here should have this import and SYNC feature, otherwise it is useless.
Still this video "Hitler finds out Gooder Reader is shutting down" at least put a broad smile back on my face :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A25VgNZD...
(via Dave Winer tweet - https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/312049161677713408)
Firefox sent me to a google page which offered me an option to add it to either iGoogle or Reader. I recalled that iGoogle is being shut-down and thought it was strange that it was still offered as a prominent option. I guess now it makes sense.
I seems strange to me though that Reader will be shut down before iGoogle, which is slated for November 1, 2013.
It's a new reader with a similar experience to NetNewsWire. It costs $2/month but there is a free 3 day trial. I created Feedbin because I was looking for an alternative to Google Reader that's simpler than what's already out there. No social junk, no ads, no content discovery. Just an RSS reader.
We should less depend on the large corporations. The idea about I think last time is that we need some kind of distributed Twitter (like we have perfectly worked distributed email now).
If you can't replace one tool with another you are in trouble definitely.
If Google still decides to kill the service, I am going to use Feedly ;).
I signed up for Google Reader...
Sorry, folks - I may have caused the shut-down.
I think a lot of competitors spend time working on the UI and miss the power that is behind it.
(I would include Google in this list, even if they didn't have the front end UI the Atom API would still be a useful thing.)
I wonder if building something on elasticsearch would work.
If you can build something that will take any URL, figure out which bits are changing regularly (the news items, etc), and push the changes to a Reader style interface, you might be on to a winner.
It's 2013, a reader should be possible without RSS.
I've been looking through alternatives. I'd like it to look like this, http://wp.me/aseR-cr , be web-based, have keyboard navigation, and not much else.
Is there a web-based newsbeuter?
(I use a desktop reader for news (FeedDemon) and an Android app for podcasts, I don't really know what I'm missing by not using something like reader.)
- The feed digesting functionality could have been merged into Google+
-Google Reader could have become a news reader skin on the of G+
As long as Google Reader remained a stand alone service and yet deeply tied into the search index, it has been doomed.
That way, I don't have to depend on any web services.
Not sure about Outlook 2012 for Mac though...
for more information, visit me on reddit username: 7hundredand77
Twitter and G+ are not viable alternatives.
Google alerts to RSS were wonderful. I'm sure they will shutter alerts soon too.
For me, RSS is a necessary evil. I always opt for email subscription when I have the choice, because I find it infinitely more convenient to have my subscriptions and emails in the one place, rather than in two separate products.
However, for sites that do not offer email subscription but only offer RSS coughHNcough - I reluctantly use Google Reader to subscribe. Meaning an extra account to check each day.
Hopefully this won't merely result in everyone switching to just another RSS aggregator - instead, I hope it will prompt websites to start using more convenient subscription methods, whether that be email or something else.
RSS is dead. Long live... ???
Now I switched to Android, I've been using Google Reader so I can sync it online too.
So now this sucks, what's the alternative?
Newsbeuter is serving me well, as usual, for years.
netvibes.com
Also, fuck any RSS feed reading service that charges monthly. I'll pay for an app, but I'm not paying a monthly subscription fee to read freely available content.
This was the home page of "My" internet.
Every alternative reader website / service: Fuck me thats a lot of traffic.
http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Ask_Google_to_keep_Google_R...
real reason they are shutting it down...they want all that sharing/interaction in Google+...which i hate.
I would gladly pay $40/month to access Google Reader.
Is Reader costing them that much money? Put some ads on it then. Is this a Captain Ahab thing where Facebook is the whale? Then someone should let them know that no one really likes their Facebook ripoff because no one likes the actual Facebook. Facebook is a fucking car crash. I wish Google would just make cool stuff and continue not being evil and knock it off with the master plan bullshit.
What is the best alternative RSS reader ??
I guess I would rather to go a paid solution. It's for the same reason that I am thinking of this move that I went to Pinboard from Delicious for - advertisements were not my worry, it was the chance being shut down.
Was Google Reader bringing any revenue to Google? I mean I never saw any ads in there, so I doubt it but some of you might be knowing better.
Not sure they have killed for just being out there not bringing any money home or they will be focussing on Google Currents now?
But stuff like this http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.ht... is more sad than the news itself :(
I just want sth like email. Like currently I host my mails with Google Apps with my domain but I can take it to my VPS any minute and my email will still be up and will keep syncing to my desktop/mobile clients without a problem. Or maybe I would shift to some free provider like ABC, XYZ etc.