It would try the patience of angels

[venta]

Never mind all this popery. The big news of the day is that Google is retiring Google Reader in July.

I use Google Reader, and am thus disappointed. On the plus side, with that gone, I'll have no reason to be signed into my Google account most of the time. I do use Google Docs, but that tends to be an infrequent sign-in-use-sign-out business. And anything which takes me one step away from Google's Giant Data Extraction Vortex is probably a good thing.

I'm lightly surprised, though. Apparently usage of Google Reader is declining. I'm not sure if this is indicative of better software being out there, or of a general decline in RSS use. Maybe all the cool kids use Facetweet as aggregators these days?

So, ladies and gentlemen of LJ, how should I read my RSS feeds in the future?

[Poll #1901989]


(Ars Technica is running a poll on "where should we go instead?", and they probably have a slightly bigger readership than I do. They're also better informed about the large number of RSS readers which rely on Google Reader to work.)

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, of the three people who've currently responded to the poll, everyone uses LJ!

[lnr]

I'm another one I'm afraid - though I do occasionally consider getting a "real" RSS reader instead, or using my web browser's aggregation facilities. (Though does Chrome's rely on Google Reader under the hood? dunno!)

I note the following possibly useful tweets:

https://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/312092941478948866
https://twitter.com/InsideFlipboard/status/312030702017335296

(A friend works for Flipboard, hence my interest, it can aggregate bits of Facebook and Twitter and things like the BBC news too - never really played with it in anger though)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that, I'll have a look at FlipBoard and at the Lifehacker suggestions. Trouble is, setting up an RSS reader is a bit of a faff, so I only really want to do it once ... but it's pretty much impossible to evaluate an RSS reader without using it. I suspect I'm too lazy to do proper research!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I used to use LJ syndication, until the volume of feeds became too great. The useful thing about Reader (and presumably other decent ones) that LJ lacks* is being able to separate them into categories.

---

* unless you want to start getting fancy with friends list groups I suppose. But then you'd have to have each category in a separate tab or something.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

The other problem with LJ syndication -- which isn't a problem on the stuff _I_ subscribe to but is a pain in the backside on my friendsfriends list -- is that it doesn't handle stuff which is updated very well. So you wind up scrolling back through, e.g., five different versions of a Grauniad article (which are all reproduced in full). Tedious....

[venta.livejournal.com]

People subscribing to the Guardian at all is one of the reasons I never bother with friendsfriends :) Not that I object to the Guardian per se, just that the high traffic means that it swamps everything.