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

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

My brief experiment with Wordpress.com's Reader feature has left me reeling in disgust. It has no way to prioritise (it's all date order). The only view I could generate was a river of previews - no way to just get headlines. And it also appears to have sent a notification that I'd subscribed to every single Wordpress.com blog that I have in my list of feeds, which is not something I expected or wanted. (And I only found out because several bloggers contacted me about it. Luckily they believed my "I'm experimenting with different feed readers" explanation.)

On the plus side, the import from the Google XML/OPML dump went without a hitch.

I'm going to stop messing around and wait at least a week or two and see what's happened by then. Most of the services that look promising are totally mullered by the traffic at the moment. And I strongly suspect that the situation will look quite different in a month's time, and we have until 1 July.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, having seen this morning's feeding frenzy, I figured "give it a couple of weeks" is the best advice :)

I claimed first thing this morning that I didn't require much in the way of features for my RSS reader. It turns out that actually I do, because things I'd regarded as "things which are in the nature of RSS readers" turn out to be features. It sounds like WordPress's reader may be one which I wish to avoid!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

More reasons not to use WordPress: it automatically defaulted to sending me email notifications each and every time someone posted to one of the "blogs I follow", which was my entire GReader set. I only discovered this when I went to check my email a few hours later and found my inbox as stuffed with bacn as I've ever seen it. (Even exceeding the previous record when a shared to-do list tool decided to send me notifications every time anyone added a new item, marked an item done, edited anything, moved items between lists, changed the people responsible, etc.)

There's no way to mass unsubscribe (that I could find) - you need to go in to each individual entry and change the settings. It was easier to simply delete all of them, but even there it required two clicks per blog, and then several refreshes each time the page/JSON/AJAX/whatever shiny tech they were using got confused by my rapid clicking and decided I was subscribed to a negative number of entries.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

In fairness I should add that, while it sucks profoundly as an RSS reader tool for me, I find WordPress.com is bloody brilliant as a blog host, and I've been a very happy customer with work-related blogs there for getting on for a decade.