2013-03-14

Now Happened: Google Reader Shuts Down July 1st, 2013. Alternatives?

I wrote about before, that Google Reader was under pressure. Now it really happened. As of today, a popup saying that Google Reader will shut down on the 1st of July.


There is a lot of fuss about it on the web right now. Google saying in a blog post about the next spring cleaning, that the usage declined. Looks like the people that are using it, really need it.

And so do I. I need it to do my research for blogging and netcasting. No way I can read far more than 1500 article from somewhat 46 sites a day (!) without a rss reader. So where are the alternatives? And I'm, talking desktop. I can't do my whole work on a tablet. But it must be usable from any device. So only web-based solutions are real alternatives.

Feedly looks to be the best solution. But the Chrome app is quite unstable and slows down sometimes. With some work, you can set it up to show the articles in a way that could be named an alternative to the beloved reader.

Interesting that many so-called alternatives shut down their services before this announcement was made.

Maybe another service might jump in. But the impact on RSS is not foreseeable. If big sites and companies shut down RSS because they think it's over now that Google dropped the most important reader on the web, it could die quickly for normal usage. Podcasts will keep RSS up and running but that's not enough for people who turbo-surf the web through their reader.
Sad...
Official Blog: A second spring of cleaning