I’m one of the 500,000 making the jump to Feedly. I
readscan 228 feeds, so quick navigation from one item to the next is of prime importance. Reader’s j/k shortcuts are permanently wired into my finger memory and I was overjoyed to find that Feedly also uses them.I’m playing with Feedly’s touch interface on a 7″ tablet, but finding it not near as efficient, not even as Reader’s Android app.
It is exciting to see all the development taking place in RSS readers, now that Google is leaving. This may actually be a good thing.
I posted this as a comment at TinyScreenfuls, but figure it was worth a post here.
What about you? Are you an RSS feed consumer? Now that Google’s leaving, what tool will you be using?
Comments
9 responses to “Buh Bye, Google Reader — Hello, Feedly”
um, people still use rss?
Absolutely. Can you think of another way I could scan 228 feeds? I’m certainly not going to visit 228 sites daily, or even weekly, in an attempt to try to remember what I’ve already read. I’m not going to rely on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ to inform me when something is posted. And email could be up to the task, should I want to slog through that many emails, but it’s not near as efficient as a well-crafted RSS reader.
I offer email subscriptions here because people never seemed to catch on how wonderful readers are.
I guess you could just have easily asked, “People still have personal blogs?” ;-)
Organizing feeds is not the way to go if you’re into quickly scanning. Don’t categorize at all, just blast through them in one big list, reading if the title and/or picture captures your interest.
If it’s too hard to subscribe/unsubscribe to feeds, you’re doing it wrong.
As long as we have blogs, we will have RSS. There’s no reason to strip it out.
And CRT monitors? I still fondly remember terminals, especially this one. :-)
I must have tried 20+ readers/clients over three or four real “attempts” to use RSS but I never really found a great way to manage the coming and going of all the feeds and categories as my interests migrated. I found myself pruning and reorganizing and relabeling my feed list forever. Blech! The feed world always made me feel either “messy” or “incomplete” or both.
For browsing a huge amount of content Twitter came along and turned out to be a much much better solution for me — following actual people (not blogs) was a genius turn, it added a great curating and recommending layer. Hashtags made following themes much simpler, and super easy to change as my whims and interests change. I’m very whimsical — that’s the core problem.
Is there anyone with a blog worth reading that doesn’t tweet or is RT’d? So for lots of content, including bloggy stuff, Twitter (and direct email from a handful of select blogs!) is where I live now.
Re: personal blogs — there’s no better place to put down 3+ grafs of self-pub content than on a blog. Wikis came and went.. file shares? ebooks? too messy, too much infrastructure. I would bet in 10 years there will still be lots and lots of blogs but RSS will be remembered fondly like floppy drives and CRT monitors..
You melt my heart with the terminal picture! awwwwww, little fellow..
I really like how Simmons broke down “the death of RSS” a couple years ago. I wonder if his view has changed much. I guess I think the death is deeper than just the client experience — I believe the format (RSS specifically) will disappear as well. But that feeds are the future of the interwebs, definitely.
I think there’s a Long Bet here somewhere if I can figure out a good metric.
Yeah, the ADM-3A is pretty cute. :-)
Simmons’ description of RSS is interesting. A couple points:
First, a lot has happened since Simmons wrote the article. The main walled-garden players now are working to kill RSS, not just client readers, but also as Internet plumbing. It conflicts with their business models of having a captive audience to pummel with ads. Fortunately, as long as there are bloggers (and there are 60+ million users of WordPress) there will be people pushing out feeds.
Second, Twitter and Facebook aren’t feeds; they’re streams. When you look at the stream, you see what’s flowing by. Stop looking, the stream keeps flowing. Pretty much like broadcast TV, including the soap operas, stupid pet tricks, and obnoxious advertising. Feed readers are like DVRs: choose which feeds you want to read and when they’re updated, you can read them whenever you want.
DVRs didn’t become a hit until they got a lot easier to use. Remember all the VCRs blinking 12:00? Google probably did a better job killing off RSS with Reader than they ever will by shutting Reader down.
I tried Feedly when it was in beta, but different like it. Witness G-Reader on death row, I’ve been looking elsewhere and have tried many. Just last week I tried Feedly again and am loving it.
I use it on my phone, 10 ” tablet, and PC.
I’m glad Feedly is working for you. It’s still a little confusing for me. I guess I just need to spend some more time with it. Google Reader got so comfortable for me, I can really whip through posts quickly. I’ll probably keep using it until Google kills it off for good, or Feedly unlinks from Reader.