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]

I can see the logic of your argument :)

However, I don't think I miss things in my RSS reader, because it clearly marks which feeds have unread items. Unread item on Tim Harford's blog? I'll get on it. Unread items in BoingBoing? Well, yeah, natural order of things, that. Leave them for when I've run out of stuff/have an excess of time.

(I've also organised things into directories, so I can just hide the "Dross" directory to stop it being distracting.)

It also makes it easier to prioritise reading things I care more about first, whereas LJ is just a big ol' linear list of stuff, and thus I'd probably lose track of things I'd otherwise go back and read at lower priority. (This could be improved by LJ custom friends lists, and things, I imagine. Interestingly, I regularly note from my server logs that people often give their custom lists quite revealing names ;)

Not suggesting you ought to do the same, of course! Just that I think my way is superior for me :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a very good system. I don't get on well with "unread" flags, because my default reading mode is to briefly glance at items as they come in and then read them later when I have time.

[venta.livejournal.com]

So do I :)

Google Reader shows me the summary, and looking at the summary doesn't affect the readness. Once you've opened the full article, it gets auto-marked as read, but is trivial to tell it "keep as unread" if you want to come back later. (There is also a concept of "starring" articles to mark them as come-back-to-later, but I use that for something different.)

I guess I've devised this strategy because it's how Google Reader works, which means it's kind of defined my requirements :-\

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Although that's not the worst way to approach things. My relationship to GMail is very similar: I use a range of different tags and coloured stars and search keywords to organise it all and if I ever move to a different email provider I'm dooomed!

[venta.livejournal.com]

it's amazing how frequently service providers fail to realise this. My email provider (whom I pay ;) recently massively overhauled their interface and released it without warning, and without any documentation, and without any advertised mechanism for going back to the old UI. And then were slightly surprised by the reaction.

(Historically they've been quite clueful, but being taken over by Oracle doesn't seem to have done them any good at all.)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

being taken over by Oracle

Oh... oh no! I'm very sorry. :-(

[venta.livejournal.com]

Although the sympathy is appreciated, it may not be justified: that was a really poor example of me spelling Opera!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

You got four of the five letters. That's basically a win.