When Google announced they stop their Reader service, I felt both old and embarassed. Suddenly, I was one of the few people who use this outdated RSS technology. What trend did I miss this time, and which service will Google stop next? Feedburner? Blogger?
There are some features of Google Reader that were really helpful: access from multiple computers and mobile phone, tag the feeds, star blogposts I want to use later, recommend blogpost via my personal feed (or later via G+), search my marked or recommended items or all feeds, find feeds similar to my subscribed ones, get some statistics on my usage behaviour, etc. For free.
Now it is only four weeks to shutdown and I still do not know what to do. Here is what I researched up to now.
Alternative online services
As far as I can see, the online alternatives on the market do not have all these features. Feedly looks promising, but in its current state it is simply a layer on Google Reader, and who knows how they manage the switch. However, it is reassureing that already 1.4 million Chrome user installed this tool, so there is reason to believe RSS is not dead.
Online services claim the convienence of “access from everywhere”. This is true only for places with internet (the Berlin subway, where I like to read RSS news is not very reliable in this aspect), and it comes with a cost, such as data privacy (not a big issue when it comes to news) or limited access (for instance, Google Takeout gives only subscriptions, not the news feed itself). This is why I looked for locally installed programs that fit my needs.
Offline?
Calibre is an ebook reader program I use to maintain my PDF collection. It has a news feature, where web pages including RSS feeds can be downloaded and – highly customizable – converted to various formats (txt, pdf, epub). Calibre can be set up as local server and the smartphone app FBReader is able to connect to it. The idea is nice, but the conversion from RSS to EPUB for over 450 feeds would take some time. Also, conversion is not always smooth. For instance, large images such as XKCD comics become hardly readable.
Another interesting offline reader is makagiga, which adds to-do list features to the newsreader functionality. However, no smartphone support as far as I can see.
Not a real option in general, but useful for certain tasks like scraping EEX data is to use a programming language with a suitable extension library, such as R's tm.plugin.webmining package.
Conclusions? Not yet
Maybe I do not feel comfortable with any of these services and programs because my trust is shaken. Maybe it is hard to give up / change habits. Whatever it is, I still have not made my mind up what to do when Google Reader shuts down. What do you do?
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