(2013-03-13) Google Reader Shutting In July

Google announced that it’s killing off Google Reader (RssAggregator) effective July 1, 2013. Earlier Product Manager Brian Shih says Reader has been fighting for approval/survival at Google since long before I was a PM for the product. I'm pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened. It was often for some reason related to social: 2008 - let's pull the team off to build OpenSocial...

I really thought they'd integrate RSS into Google Plus before killing Reader. (Google Plus still doesn't have an API either!)

If you really loved Google Reader’s features, Feed Ly is planning to launch a clone of the service. It will give you the features, but the community is basically gone for good. (Ironically, the clone will be run on Google App Engine.) Feed Ly is getting so much traffic now that it's down!

Les Orchard lists the "social novelty filtering" (Social Network Context for Meme Tracker) features he'd like to see re-created in a distributed way. (I never really used those in Google Reader.)

Zoinks, the key piece of My Social Media Mix just got hosed. While I've been doing all my RSS reading on my Lap Top lately (meaning I don't need a server-synch component), I don't want to count on that for the future, so I really want to find a replacement that has a server piece. It also needs to support folders/tags so I can browse sub-lists of feeds.

Yeah, in the Long Run this will be a good thing.

Bryan Alexander notes a number of alternatives that include the synch aspect.

Matt Haughey reviews some server-based options.

Jamie Zawinski thinks the Data Synch-across-devices Fat Client problem has been made overly complex. There are probably dozens if not hundreds of different, low-impact ways to share a single .newsrc file among three devices: Dropbox, iCloud, IMAP, CalDAV... the list goes on. (If you have hundreds of feeds, doing whole-file updates to that state might be failure-prone.) He tried Feed Ly and hated the GUI.

• I've been trying Feed Ly and kinda feel the same way.

NewsBlur sounds interesting, but rather involved to install.

Digg's reader might be interesting, to the extent that their other portfolio of services helps surface interesting new stuff. But I'm skeptical that's likely to work to an extent that would save me time.

I think the big win for RSS would be an "EnterPrise" tool that could suck in feeds from lots of private sources (Software Forge-s, etc.) and give you a Universal Inbox.