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The news is so unfortunate, but true. Google Reader will be no more and so by this summer, if you want to continue using RSS feeds, you will need to find an alternative. Many of you have said you like Feedly. I cannot agree more, in fact I wrote an article on Feedly two months before the announcement and how much I loved their iOS application.
The unfortunate part is that at the current experience, no alternative can give you the exact same experience that Google Reader does, here’s why.
- It’s More Than Design
Some of the RSS alternatives out there are beautiful, but display is only a small portion of an RSS reader and we need the backend to be responsive, fast, and powerful. Google Reader may not have a flashy display, but they do have the rest. - Google’s Resources Are Just Better
Google has the resources to scour the Internet in half a second. Think about it and try this experiment: type in your search to Google’s search on their homepage and see how long it takes to find a result. Fast? Yeah. That power Google has is unmatched by any other website out there and these RSS alternatives are no where close to what Google Reader can do. - Web Crawls Mean Instant Updates
The other part of Google’s forces is their seemingly endless supply of web bots that crawl across the ever growing Internet and when you post a new blog post, it shows up in Google Reader lightning fast. This is impossible to do with the alternatives out there currently and so the delay between posting and showing up in readers will be much larger.
We hate to be pestimistic, but they are really going to have to step it up. What do you foresee with RSS readers and their future?
Rachel Blom says
I’m trying out Feedly right now, like many others, and it’s not bad, but it’s still no Google Reader. I loved the simplicity and the overview. In Feedly for instance, I can’t see read posts like I did in Reader (or if I can, I haven’t discovered how yet). I loved having that overview, for instance to see how often a blog had posted to see if it was still worth following. It’s just one of the things that I miss. I don’t care much for that magazine style layout, I read way too many feeds to make that work since I actually do want to see them all and not just a few. So anyway, I agree that there’s no real alternative yet…hope there will be though!
seventy8Productions says
I think my biggest gripe won’t even be cosmetics, but the power behind it. I want to see the latest and greatest and not have to wait five or eight hours…. :/ We’ll see
kolby milton says
I am also giving feedly a try. I was pissed that google ditched reader instead of making it better. I use a program to read my rss feeds so I am not sure how this will mess with it. Great post.
seventy8Productions says
We will see… there are suppose to be Google Reader clones, but they will by no means have the power that Google has.
kolby milton says
I totally agree. I feel like this is the death of rss. Makes me sad. It is good for mail chimp.
Steve Kenow says
I think you’re blending different Google products – Google Reader, Google Alerts and Google Search. RSS does not rely on search, but on a specially formatted list of results from a specific online resource. Where Google has blended these products is in that you can create an alert based on a search and then send it to Google Reader. That isn’t true RSS.
Google Alerts does rely heavily on Google Search – in fact, it could not exist without it. This is where Google definitely has the advantage, even over the other top search engines. That one of the options for delivery of alerts is going away is significant for some.
Another Google product – feedburner – has bridged the gap for some sites without the capability of creating the RSS feed themselves, which really is quite few, if you are using any of the common platforms for websites (most modern CMS offers this in their basic configuration, or as an add-on).
Do I think the demise of Google will change how the majority of people already leveraging RSS do so? Probably not. If it were to have that level of impact, Google wouldn’t be dropping it.
Youth Culture Report says
It looks like a lot of our referrers are coming from feedly, lets see how time will tell what is the next best RSS reader.