
Google Reader shutting down - knurdle
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html
======
conesus
This has been a long time coming. Four years ago I began work on my own feed
reader, NewsBlur, and it's now a full-fledged Google Reader competitor. It's
also a paid app and has been paying for itself nearly since the beginning.

<http://www.newsblur.com>

I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps
on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story
sharing was launched last Summer and I expect NewsBlur to be around for quite
a while.

It's also fully open-source, in case you decide to build your own private
community: <http://github.com/samuelclay>.

I also have a full-scale re-design in the works, but if you can't get to the
main site you can try using the beta site: <http://dev.newsblur.com>

~~~
recuter
It is often asked of startup founders 'what if Google starts doing what you
do?', a valid question. Perhaps it is worth contemplating products too small
for Google to concern themselves with, ones they might abandon, that would
still be an attractive opportunity for the rest of us.

I've been rooting for you and recall enjoying the blog posts about its making
- I've always figured that "RSS is dead" and there is no longer money in
clients (people used to pay for desktop readers!)..

Except that Google would kill Reader eventually and somebody will soak that
userbase of nerds right up. And NewsBlur is clearly the top choice and will
hopefully occupy similar mindshare as Reader did for us until now. Congrats,
well played. :)

I wonder what the next one along these lines will be as now would be a great
time to start building it.

~~~
boyter
Its not as lucrative as you would think. When Google Code Search shut down I
launched code search <http://searchco.de> and while it got some attention it
was nowhere near as much as you would expect.

That said I do think that going after markets abandoned by the big guys is an
excellent way to go. Usually they abandon it because its not a billion dollar
business and isn't worth their time.

I believe now that you need to start attacking their market-share before they
close the product down and use the closure as a marketing opportunity.

~~~
philgoetz
I never found Google Code Search useful. What I wanted to be able to do was to
search for code expressions with Google -- to be able, for instance, to search
for the words "C++" or "call-next-method", exactly as I type them, punctuation
and casing and all. No synonyms, no "corrections", no singular/plural
conversions, no punctuation-stripping. Google never provided a way to search
for exactly what I asked it to search for. Still the main thing missing from
google search.

~~~
subsection1h
Google's Verbatim tool doesn't do the job?

[http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1734130)

~~~
eitland
I wrote up a quick reponse to that one (many googlers ask for data when
confronted with how their main product is declining) and here it is:
techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-search-results.html

Not pretty but have some real examples. Please post your own and paste a link
here or in the comments.

~~~
eitland
Copied from comment on blog:

\--------

Anonymous14 March, 2013 19:55

Obviously a comparison of search results is difficult due to the various
signals used to alter search results, but as of 3/14/2013 I get what appear to
be 'reasonable' results for both of your example searches:

"sublime text 2" "focus group" : <http://i.imgur.com/4LpuUYq.png>

cisco "anyclient" : <http://i.imgur.com/kptK8HO.png>

Again, doesn't necessarily detract from your issue, but just giving search
terms isn't reproducible!

\--------

I can now verify that Cisco "Anyclient" is not silently rewritten anymore.
Will have to wait and see if they weeded out this particular snag, if they
adjusted their fuzzing towards sane or if they just gave me a better bubble
(I'd like that I think.).

------
wslh
Google Reader is irreplaceable, it is not only about reading RSS. That is the
easy part. It is about going back in time and accessing all past feeds in an
organized way (it is difficult to rebuilt that from crawling and web
scraping). If you add a blog now you can read articles that are not present in
the current feed.

Google Reader is the core of my information diet. Not twitter. Thousands of
blogs starred, liked, and commented. An interesting feature that you couldn't
replace is automatic translation: reading a russian blog asmit was written in
english. Once I shared one of its articles and one friend asked me if I knew
russian or if it was a joke my share! Because obviously the share was in the
original language.

Google is evil. While I can understand a business decision, there are ways to
hand it over to other companies or organizations.

I share some of my previous criticism:

\- Extraction of Main Text Content Using the Google Reader NoAPI:
<http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/>

-Google Search NoAPI: <http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/>

\- The Data Portability Fact Sheet: <http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-
portability-fact-sheet/>

\- Reverse Engineering and the Cloud:
[http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-
engineering-a...](http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-
and-the-cloud/)

~~~
_delirium
It's unclear to me if they're also discontinuing the Google Feed API:
<https://developers.google.com/feed/>

This is quite valuable because it includes historical data, including stuff
that's dropped off the currently available RSS feeds (many sites only list
recent posts in their feeds).

~~~
lobster_johnson
Oh, and it looks like the feed API may not be used to save anything; Google's
API ToS [1] document has the following text:

    
    
        Unless expressly permitted by the content owner
        or by applicable law, you agree that you will
        not, and will not permit your end users to, do
        the following with content returned from the APIs:
    
        * Scrape, build databases or otherwise create 
        permanent copies of such content, or keep cached 
        copies longer than permitted by the cache header;
        * Copy, translate, modify, create a derivative 
        work of, sell, lease, lend, convey, distribute, 
        publicly display or sublicense to any third party;
        * Misrepresent the source or ownership; or
        * Remove, obscure, or alter any copyright, 
        trademark or other proprietary rights notices,
        falsify or delete any author attributions, legal
        notices or other labels of the origin or source 
        of material.
    

The first two bullet points are the ones that apply. You can't use the feed
API to fetch a bunch of feeds and make them available through an app, for
example.

[1] <https://developers.google.com/terms/>

------
klausa
That's the first Google service shutdown that I'm affected by.

Sad to see it go.

What do you guys recommend for replacement? I know about NewsBlur [1], but I
never liked it that much.

I think I'm just looking for something that would emulate Reader's full-screen
view as close as possible.

[1] <http://newsblur.com>

edit: Here's what I consider an absolute must-have in RSS app:

\- complete navigation with keyboard (j/k preferred)

\- full screen mode (really, I don't need a sidebar of a fixed header all the
time)

\- feed view (not just list of items, show me excerpts!)

And I know I may be the weird one, but I really, _really_ dislike readers that
try to show me items directly from feeds webpage. I find it jarring and
distracting when I have five totally different layouts flash before my eyes
within 10 seconds (I skim headlines and then skip most of items in my feed).

And for the love of god, please, _please_ , no goddamn 'WE LEARN WHAT YOU
LIKE' or any kind of bullshit 'smart selection'. I selected my feeds myself, I
can manage them just fine by myself, just get out of my way, please.

~~~
kmfrk
I just Fever (<http://www.feedafever.com/>). You host it yourself, and it does
the job perfectly.

~~~
initself
PHP and MySQL, yuck!

~~~
throwaway420
Is the software any less useful because it's not created in a trendy language?

One of the advantages that PHP has is that virtually any cheap web-host in the
world can run it. It's not a bad choice to sell a self-hosted product in PHP
because of this advantage.

I'm not a huge fan of PHP for many types of projects, but I don't see how it
benefits anybody to reflexively hate on something just because of a technology
choice.

~~~
wpietri
PHP was such a security nightmare for so long that I am very reluctant to
enable it on any box I actually care about. (It could well be better. It's
been a long time since I was sysadmining many boxes.) So for a project I have
to do the hosting on, language choice still matters to me.

~~~
hadem
And you're a huge fan of Ruby on Rails right...?

~~~
gmac
Whatever else he's running, adding PHP to it increases the risk.

~~~
maratd
That's true of any piece of software you add.

------
karpathy
"over the years usage has declined"

That's because there was almost ZERO innovation done on this product. Very few
(mostly visual) improvements, and very few new features. The latest posts on
Google Reader blog are from 2011 <http://googlereader.blogspot.com/>

~~~
mgkimsal
Was thinking the same thing - usage has declined in part because Google
doesn't promote it.

Google shapes the way many people discover, use and keep information (google
search, maps, news, finance, gmail, etc). To let Reader languish then kill it
because "usage has declined" is rather self-fulfilling. I bet if they didn't
update their satellite images and road data, Maps usage would decline as well.

They could have been working with the community to define new standards -
tags, markup, etc - to allow richer interaction between rss readers and sites
(thinking geoloc micro format work, and other semantic markup work in recent
years). Making 'reader' a first-class citizen in its suite of services, then
using interaction data as more relevance signaling seems like an evolutionary
step that only a handful of players the size of google can make good use of,
but apparently in their infinite wisdom, they'll just shutter it.

------
onan_barbarian
Pretty irritated at the way Google takes moderately successful services that
can't possibly cost them all that much to keep running and puts them down the
memory hole, to foster the happy illusion that everything that everything that
Google does turns to gold.

I'm sure there's more engagement with Reader than Plus, with its millions of
users who don't really use it (many of whom aren't even really aware that they
are signed up for it).

~~~
Udo
Google is one of those companies that make me feel like a wuss for being their
customer. Okay, in this case one could (convincingly) argue that advertisers
are the real customers of Google Reader, but I would have gladly just paid for
the service. Apple is another such company for me, and I dumped considerable
amounts of money into them, and they similarly just let me know with every
single action that I'm not their kind of customer.

So the question becomes not "why is everyone using them?" or even "why are
they doing things like this?", it starts with people like me who got to ask
themselves honestly "why do I keep relying on these guys?".

Gmail is my main email account and it makes me deeply uncomfortable. I love OS
X, despite its ever-increasing flaws, and that makes me feel like a hostage
experiencing Stockholm syndrome. Facebook is the only thing in this category I
actually stopped caring about on my own, but if I'm being honest that's more
my friends' fault for re-enacting soap opera scripts online and offline, and
less because Facebook is a data-grabbing virus that screws its users over at
every turn (which it is).

My only face-saving answer to that conundrum is those products offer me some
things that others don't, they have features that large companies are better
positioned to deliver on. However, that's not a permanent state of things, as
the complex features of yesterday become increasingly more feasible for
smaller developers to tackle tomorrow. Maybe it's a good thing that Google and
others are finally straight-up bent on filtering nerds like me out of their
customer base, maybe that's the kick needed to overcome inertia and
complacency.

~~~
rdl
You really should get off Gmail. At the very least, use a domain and google
apps for your domain, to keep the option of fleeing later.

Even for search, there are really only a few companies crawling now -- Google,
Bing/MS, and Blekko. I'm going to try Bing for a month (I tried in the past,
and it wasn't great, but was close) and Blekko for another month, but I'm
pretty sure I don't care about any other Google services.

~~~
Udo
Respectfully, I know that. And I know you mean well but the purpose of my post
was exploring motives why I didn't yet. I know it's not fashionable to conduct
oneself around here as anything but infallibly well-informed and doing all the
things exactly right, but I wanted to offer a perspective of someone who
sometimes exhibits imperfections in regard to the products he uses and the
tradeoffs that may play a role in selecting certain kinds of products despite
the downsides.

~~~
rdl
I just meant that it's reasonable to make the tradeoff to trust a vendor like
Apple/Google/etc. with whom you have fundamental philosophical differences
_now_ , if their product is better than the alternatives. What's not OK is to
have no possible way to switch.

Changing an email address or phone # is probably enough of a lock-in to be
"impossible". Changing the service provider you use otherwise to provide your
phone/email/etc., probably a pain, but possible.

Facebook doesn't support indirection (which is why it's crazy that businesses
promote fb.com/site urls), but as you've pointed out, it doesn't actually
provide a useful service, so if it goes away, no big loss.

------
vacipr
What the fuck.

Later edit: Like many other will most likely do in their replies I'm also
going to suggest an alternative that I've tried in the past.
<http://theoldreader.com/>

Later edit 2: They even added a nice pop-up now.
<https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.imm.io/Zg6A.png>

~~~
tracker1
Well.. was going to sign in with my google account, but they seem to want
"manage my contacts" permission.

~~~
jap
Could be an oversight. I think "manage my contacts" is a default permission
requested when not explicitely setting the scope in OAuth...

~~~
mineo
This is not an oversight, it's even mentioned in their privacy policy [0],
although I also stopped at that point. Whenever I see a service requesting
permission to even have a look at my contact list, I really wish there were a
button like "No, I really don't need this social stuff because I know noone in
my contact list uses your service anyway and if someone does, I really don't
care".

[0] <http://theoldreader.com/pages/privacy>

~~~
jap
Thanks. That rules out the Old Reader for me. I think they should make it
optional: only ask for this permission if I try to use the social
functionality.

------
guiambros
Google should open source it. Seriously. Donate the code base to the open
source community, and let someone run with it.

With some luck it'd attract enough developers to keep the project alive. Or
maybe somebody would figure out a way to monetize the effort. Either option,
it'd be much better than just let the service die.

It's not unprecedented. Google did exactly this with Google Wave.

Sadly, I don't think this will ever happen. This project is too small to
justify the resources needed to clean up the code and solve any dependencies.
And, differently than Chromium / Android / Google Wave, Google Reader is not a
platform / protocol / OS. It's just yet-another pet project for a company that
- sooner or later - has to justify its investment to Wall Street.

This isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, product that Google
creates just to later destroy it, when it discover it has no business or
economic justification.

Keep this in mind when developing for Mirror API, or anything else that is not
core for the company.

~~~
btipling
I doubt that open sourcing it is going to be any help to anyone since it
probably integrates deeply with Google's proprietary backends.

~~~
Flenser
I wonder if Merchant Circle would be willing to sell the old Bloglines
codebase seeing as they aren't using it.

------
k3n
I'll bet you anything the catalyst behind this is in some way related to G+,
the introduction of which has led to a steady removal of features from Reader.

This news is really rubbing me the wrong way; I've been a long-time Google
customer, even a 'Google hipster' as my friends would say. I'm an early-
adopter that often beta tests. I was the only one at work with GMail when it
was released, and was always out of invites that first year. Same for GVoice
(which I've had since GrandCentral), GWave, Apps for personal domains, and
Chrome (where I've posted many bug reports that were accepted).

I've been with Reader since the year it came out, though I never used any
other RSS reader -- I'd tried several, but they all sucked; Reader was just a
breath of fresh air, "cloud" based before that was even a buzzword, and I've
introduced many a friend to its wonderful utility. My favorite feature was the
_'note in reader'_ bookmarklet, which they killed in favor of crappy G+, but
now they're going to outright kill the entire product?

My only hope, if they don't grant a stay of execution, will be that they open-
source the code such as they did with Wave. At least then I'll have some hope
of retaining my most-used web app of all time.

    
    
        From your 117 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 398 items, clicked 189 items, starred 7 items, and emailed 0 items.
    
        Since October 26, 2010 you have read a total of 20,685 items.
    

(I think 10/2010 is when I was finally able to transition my normal GMail
account to a GAFYD account, thus why the metrics stop there)

Needless to say, I use this app 10x more than any other, including email
(edit: ok I might be exaggerating).

Also, it looks like the Google Operating System (unofficial blog) recognized
the distress signals back in December with "Google Reader, 'Constantly on the
Chopping Block'"[1].

Where's my pitchfork...

1\. [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-reader-
const...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-reader-constantly-
on-chopping.html)

~~~
tracker1
Without iGoogle, and Google Reader.. honestly, I don't have much use for
Google over say DuckDuckGo. I signed into the Android/Google echosystem..
mainly for iGoogle, and Reader.. with both going away, I'm pretty close to
out.

~~~
peapicker
Until you brought it up, I didn't realize that those are really the only two
products of theirs I use outside of search as well...

 _sigh_

------
taeric
I hate saying this, as it sounds like I'm just bitter, but this really could
be enough to finally leverage me off of google. Reader is _by far_ my most
used app of theirs. Plus is garbage in comparison.

~~~
awhow
I am the say way. And I feel that my heavy use of Gmail and Google Reader
meant that I was more likely to use other Google products when needed, ie
Docs, Calendar. Without Reader, I don't feel like a Google user, just a Gmail
user.

------
aaronbrethorst
I've been a Google Reader user since the beginning, and have had an uneasy
sense that this was coming for a while. I started building a replacement for
it that fits my needs a couple months ago.

It's not ready yet, but I thought I might as well toss up a launchrock page
and collect email addresses from other folks who might be interested:
<http://signup.viafeeds.com>

Here are my guiding principles:

1\. It's going to cost money. I refuse to 'lose money on each customer, but
make it up on volume.' I imagine that for more casual users, this'll be a
nominal amount. I won't compromise on this because....

2\. I want to build something sustainable, and have it be enough of a profit
center for me that I'm willing to focus on it and continually improve it for
years to come.

3\. I want to build something that I'll love more than Google Reader. I spend
at least an hour a day in Google Reader, and want to make sure that whatever I
build has the simplicity of Reader.

I have a lot of interesting ideas I want to try out around inclusion of
contextual information and the ability to easily save or share articles or
clips of articles in multiple ways. From conversations I've had with friends
in the journalism world, there's a real need for a product like this,
especially one with a legitimate business model.

Regarding where this fits in relative to NewsBlur: I think NewsBlur is doing a
lot of interesting stuff, but it feels heavyweight to me, compared to Google
Reader. I want a very minimalistic, "just the facts, ma'am" experience.

What do you want to see in a news feed product? Where do you think Google
Reader could've or should've been in 2013 if Google had properly maintained
it?

Anyway, to reiterate, if you're interested, head over here and enter your
email address: <http://signup.viafeeds.com> (I _just_ created the domain an
hour ago, so hopefully it'll have propagated to your DNS server).

~~~
pyre

      | 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.'
    

I think that you meant something else. Nobody "makes it up in volume." ;)

~~~
krallja
That's the joke.

~~~
wpietri
Quite literally: <https://www.google.com/#q=well+make+it+up+on+volume>

------
_delirium
Weird decision. Judging by my logs, and those of several other sites I know
about, it still has quite significant usage, though I don't know what their
threshold is. For example, my own blog has 12x as many Google Reader
subscribers as NewsBlur subscribers. Perhaps even with significant usage, that
usage wasn't monetizable, and the what-people-read data wasn't valuable enough
to keep it operating?

Good news for the competition, anyway: Google Reader being pretty good yet
completely free and not (obviously) monetized occupied a lot of that space,
which is now freed up.

edit: In fact, I see NewsBlur is completely unresponsive now, presumably due
to sudden interest.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Newsblur had under 2,000 users in the last day. So the usage of Google Reader
isn't as significant as you think.

------
nickbaum
Former Reader PM here, no longer at Google. Having fought many times to keep
Reader alive, it's worth considering whether a large enough outcry would lead
them to reconsider.

White House Petition!

~~~
anigbrowl
Within the limits of confidentiality and business ethics, can you explain what
the issues are in a situation like this? I agree with other readers above that
Reader is probably a poor source of ad clicks and thus direct revenue, but it
seems like it would offer invaluable forward intelligence for Google (just as
searches for 'influenza' and 'flu' have proved to be excellent leading
epidemiological indicators). ISTM that the value proposition for Google was in
mining the behavior of Reader users to identify what would be interesting/
popular/ important a week or a month from now, and would help to optimize the
value of keyword searches etc in adwords.

~~~
nickbaum
As a stand-alone product, Google Reader could easily have justified continued
investment and headcount.

The problem is that internally you're competing for resources against products
with (a) tons of users (Gmail), (b) tons of revenue (AdWords), (c) high
strategic priority (Android, Google+).

To justify staffing a smaller product, you have to argue that it has the
potential to be as big as the other products, and that the marginal impact of
an engineer is higher on an under-staffed product.

~~~
anigbrowl
Sounds like the unwritten correlate of that is that you can't measure what you
don't build, and without the measurements you don't get to build. I wonder
what magic econometric fairy dust grants a project high strategic priority.

------
wyclif
I've been an active, daily user of Google Reader since the beginning. I knew
this was coming, but it still doesn't feel right because unlike other Google
properties that I don't use, it's part of my information flow.

What I'd really like to see here on HN is a post comparing other RSS
contenders like NewsBlur and The Old Reader.

~~~
Maxious
These seems to be the most short sighted bit - they had the techarati 1%
visiting a Google social media property multiple times a day and yet they
neutered it (rather than integrating properly) to work more on Google+.

~~~
kingoftheintern
My impression is that the internet's elite click almost no ads, so Google as a
profit-seeking entity doesn't necessarily care too much about what they do or
think in aggregate, as long as they don't get upset enough to be heard by
people who actually make up their revenue streams.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's what's stupid. Outlier users like this are the least likely to be
attracted to standard consumption vectors like ads (IYSWIM), but the avenues
of investigation they pursue instead are likely a very good guide to where the
median consumer in a given market will move later.

A fanatic motorcyclist (for example) is going to scour all sorts of obscure
information sources that non-fanatics will not have the patience or time for.
But that pattern of scouring will point towards the factors which do move the
mass of consumers some time later. Heavy users of Reader were supplying Google
with a lot of high-quality data, and if the product had been given the same
attention as something like GMail that information would be worth
proportionally more.

------
pauljonas
NOOOOO!

It is my most accessed browser URL.

It is the primary method I peruse new stuff on the web.

It is the only RSS app that can handle my volume of RSS subscriptions (all
others choke and sputter once the feed total is greater than a couple
hundred).

~~~
zanny
Uh oh. Not good for someone with over a thousand RSS feeds from various
updates-once-a-year products or sites.

~~~
eli
You can export most of your data (and certainly the list of feeds you follow)
<http://www.dataliberation.org/google/reader>

------
yread
> CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers (only)

Wasn't a big brouhaha about windows phone only supporting Exchange protocol
and not the open standard that's used by everyone: CalDAV? Oh, and now Google
is discontinuing it! Let's see how much longer Exchange will last...

~~~
spinchange
More like let's see how much longer Google Apps will last in the enterprise. I
am _NOT_ a big MS fan, but Windows & Office is still a major factor for
businesses and a big part of the Apps allure was that it was interoperable
with existing Windows/Office deployments.

As enterprises using Apps upgrade and find that they no longer sync with any
of their brand new software, people are going to be very upset - particularly
those with egg on their face who sold their company on Google Apps (like yours
truly)

~~~
fludlight
Would you be interested in a Google Calendar API to CalDAV translator program
or service?

~~~
bruceboughton
That seems like a backward step.

------
EugeneOZ
Just want to repeat here my tweets: Maybe GoLang will be retired in August?
AngularJS in September? GAE in October? "Backed by Google" is a joke now. I
just can't trust Google anymore. Google Reader was important part of my day -
source of information. Google apps are too UNSTABLE to use.

~~~
Benferhat
> GAE in October?

AppEngine's deprecation policy:

 _7.2 Deprecation Policy.

Google will announce if we intend to discontinue or make backwards
incompatible changes to this API or Service. We will use commercially
reasonable efforts to continue to operate that Service without these changes
until the later of: (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20,
2015, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):

# required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change
in applicable law or relationship), or

# doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material
technical burden.

_

[0] <https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms> _scroll down to 7.2_

------
anon1385
One more for the list of killed Google services:

Code Search, Google Search API (twice), Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs,
Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Squared, Google Catalogs,
Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-
Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google
Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder,
Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google
Health, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide
products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke!
Pets), Google Pack, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary.

Friends don't let friends rely on free web services.

~~~
k3n
Wow, at first I was thinking that this was their first shutdown that really
affected me, but looking at your list there's many other services that I
really enjoyed and utilized very frequently.

* Code Search -- how did I forget this awesome tool? What an invaluable, educational, and fun tool that was.

* Google Video -- somewhat redundant with YouTube, but I always felt Video had a place in that it seemed to be much more liberal than YT and also allowed larger uploads.

* Google Desktop -- ok, this one did hurt. My primary use for it was to search my Outlook mail at work (f'g Outlook search is the worst I've ever seen in any product). Now I'm back to never being able to find an email...

* Google Notebook -- a very awesome online clipbook / personal wiki. I still miss it.

* GOOG-411 -- I still miss this service too. Going online is just too slow and tedious, not to mention impossible and/or illegal when you're driving (whereas hitting a speeddial for GOOG-411 was quick and easy). And no, the "voice search" on my phone is not the same, not even close.

* Google Health -- this was a very neat service that I think was ahead of its time, and I didn't use it much (as I didn't have many health issues at the time), but as I age, I'm wishing more & more I had a centralized location to store my medical history on _my_ terms.

* Google Dictionary -- another tool I used on a daily basis. At least there's an official extension[1] that I can use in its place that is functionally equivalent (for my uses); just turn off the pop-ups and invoke it manually from the button.

Pretty scary how many of my tools and services that I came to rely on were
shuttered; however, I think the powering down of Reader will impact me the
most.

1\. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-
dictionary-...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-
by-goog/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja?hl=en)

------
rdl
Ugh. I was living in fear of this happening for the past 3 years.

I will never trust Google again.

Apparently the only Google service I don't have a good alternative for is
Google Books (for search; kindle, torrented bookwarez, and scribd works fine
for the raw PDFs)

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
> I will never trust Google again.

What other free hosted service provider deserves your "trust" that it will
never, ever go away, and which provides facilities for exporting all your data
in a nice way (a feature which will likely be accessible long into the
future)?

I'm just as irritated as you are, but given that they've provided notice and
good backup/takeout options, I don't see a betrayal of trust anywhere.

~~~
rdl
I didn't use Google Reader because it was free, I used it because it was 1)
good and 2) the back-end to essentially every other RSS-based service I used.
So they're not competing with "free", they're competing with everything.

I learned this lesson when I made the mistake of Google Voice (which was free
for some aspects).

~~~
wildmXranat
I concur with this sentiment. It is good enough to pay for in my point of
view. Google simply made the choice of wanting to monetize on their current
user group. It makes me wonder if they'll open source it so that others can
self-host it.

------
Samuel_Michon
I'm very disappointed by this. I use Reader to manage all my RSS feeds. I
check Reeder on my phone more than I use any other app.

It just goes to show, if you're using Google software that has no advertising
and isn't used to sell advertising, it could end any day, and it probably will
some day.

I'll be purchasing a Feedafever license, which also happens to work with
Reeder. <http://www.feedafever.com/>

~~~
mh-
I'm looking at FaF but not seeing how this works with Reeder?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Reeder on the iPhone syncs with Fever, but neither the Mac nor iPad versions
of Reeder do.

Sunstroke (<https://goneeast.com/sunstroke/>) is a better Fever-specific
client for the iPhone, I think... but it doesn't have either an iPad or a Mac
version. On the Mac you can use Fever's web interface but on the iPad you're
pretty much out of luck, as there are no native clients and trying to use the
web interface there is crazy-making. (Actually, the web interface is a little
crazy-making in _any_ web browser. It's just a _lot_ crazy-making on the
iPad.)

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Wow. I mostly use Reeder on my phone, but it hadn't even crossed my mind that
the iPad and OS X versions possibly wouldn't have Fever support.

The author should really make that a priority, he has 2,5 months to make it
happen.

------
Spittie
This is a sad news, one of my favourite RSS reader is closing. Google Reader
is likely the site I browse the most, and I always have one tab open on it.
Also, my phone sync with RSS with it.

I guess it's time to start searching for a new RSS reader. Too bad that I
already did it a while ago, and every time I went back to Google Reader.

The biggest problem for me with other feed reader is that they try to add too
many features to the simple format that RSS is. No, I don't care about "hot
news", and I don't care about "suggested stories", I just want to read the
feed I've added to it. My brain is good enough to skim through that list by
just reading the title.

And most other reader lack integration with a mobile platform
(Android/iOS/WP). Yes, sometimes they have a mobile client, but usually not
nearly good enough as 3rd party clients.

Hopefully they'll change their mind, but I doubt it. Time to force myself.
Sigh.

~~~
icebraining
Try Tiny Tiny RSS. It's pretty light, just a list of folders/feeds on a left
pane and the items on the right. I've switched from GReader a few months ago
and it's working pretty well.

I don't know if there are any 3rd party clients, though. I know it has a
mobile UI, but it's web, not native.

~~~
Spittie
Thanks, I looked into it some times ago. Liked it, but didn't bother to switch
since Google Reader was working so nicely for me.

I know it has a mobile app for android, but it always seemed sub-par to
gReader or Press for me.

------
Udo
People have said repeatedly that RSS is dead, and that's apparently true, but
I've been wondering for a few years now what has replaced it? It's not like
social networks provide the same kind of service, really.

So is getting updates from people and projects you care about really such a
niche thing? Have I missed some other huge channel that supersedes RSS? Or are
we about to actually lose something profound here?

Kudos to Newsblur, which I never heard of before today. I'd like to sign up
for a paying membership, but it seems like this is exactly what everyone else
is doing, so servers are dead...

~~~
doidydoidy
Protip: when people like that say "RSS is dead", what they mean is
"unfashionable".

~~~
Udo
I thought that was self-evident. Unfashionable is the first step in a trend
that ends with "dead and abandoned".

As an aside: I implore you not to say things like "protip" here. It comes off
as immature and condescending if not outright hostile. I realize it's a quick
and snappy way to get upvotes from like-minded users but it's really that kind
of phrase which prompts people to complain about redditization or 4chanization
when they refer to the declining post quality of HN.

------
guelo
These web companies prove over and over again that it's not possible to trust
them with your data. What would stop Google from killing your gmail or docs
when they don't see it as valuable anymore?

The worst part is how the big guys kill all competition with their free
products leaving few alternatives for users.

~~~
cma
You can get all your Gmail data over standard IMAP. If you don't take
advantage that to make personal backups, you are a fool.

~~~
joonix
Is there software that connects over IMAP and archives all your mail into one
file? Not an email client.

~~~
influx
Archivemail will do exactly that:

<http://archivemail.sourceforge.net/>

------
mindcrime
F^&@ D^&@ IT! ^%&( ()&@& @&!^$&!!!!!

Of ALL the things they would shut-down, they have to kill Reader!??
Nooooooooooooo!! Aaargggghhhh....

Oh well, guess it's back to RSSOwl[1]. Maybe this will even motivate me to get
involved in hacking on RSSOwl a bit and help those guys out.

This will probably also serve as the impetus for me to start adding some
Reader like features to Neddick[2]. That was always sort of in the back of my
mind, so why not go ahead and jump on it?

[1]: <http://rssowl.org/>

[2]: <https://github.com/Fogbeam/Neddick>

~~~
pknight
I switched to RSSowl quite a while ago and didn't find myself longing back to
Google Reader once. It does everything I'd want, it's just not that pretty of
an application.

~~~
mindcrime
My biggest gripe with RSSOwl was that it was that it had some performance
issues, especially if you had a lot of feeds. And using Google Reader
eliminated the need to synchronize my list of feeds between multiple RSSOwl
instance (like, say, my personal laptop and my company laptop).

But the first issue may be mitigated by hardware improvements since the last
time I was using RSSOwl regularly, and I have some ideas around the second
issue.

------
tvladeck
Mixed emotions.

I remember at the end of college and right after (I graduated in 2008), many
of my close friends were on GReader and we would share and communicate
directly through it about interesting things we were reading. It was an
awesome way to interact, and nothing has replaced it for my group and me.
Google's implicit (although I could be reading their intentions incorrectly)
strategy of trying to route that interaction through GPlus did not work for
us. Too much overhead and it never materialized. Now we just use email, which
is fine. So on the whole it's a type of social interaction that has simply
gone. It's a shame, because I think that Google could have done something with
this. But they are just one company and the number of innovative things
they're doing is really impressive.

Maybe this will clear the way for a competitor that replaces the social
interaction component and innovates on it. I'd be a user for sure.

~~~
tvchurch
I'd note that Readertron (readertron.com) was built by a guy who was
frustrated when Google nerfed the sharing among friends feature.

MIght want to give it a shot.

~~~
sbarre
I am interested in Google Reader replacements, but that site has zero
information for me before asking me for my email and to sign up..

Hmmmm

~~~
greenmountin
It actually looks pretty good, I was disappointed that there weren't any
evangelists listing it in the other threads.

I signed up in two seconds by using a mailinator address. It looks like an
exact clone + sharing/contacts. On revisiting though, the XML import failed.
Too bad.

------
surrealize
I use Reader's "star" functionality to keep track of stuff that I want to
refer back to later. And, AFAICT, you _can't_ easily export your star history.
You can export your subscriptions, but not the stars.

The only approach that I've seen to exporting stars is to use the fact that
Reader will create a feed of just your starred items. Then you can view that
feed in some other reader and _manually mark each one_ there (ugh).

Edit: Oh, and the read/not read history is, AFAICT, also not exportable. And I
do use this as well.

~~~
skymt
Stars are, in fact, exportable. The "Google Takeout" zip archive for Reader
includes a file called starred.json, containing a list of your starred items
in a JSON format that, as far as I know, nothing else reads. If whatever
reader you switch to can import marked items, you can probably work up a
script to convert Google's format to whatever the new reader uses.

~~~
surrealize
Thanks! The last time I checked was when they turned my google-account-with-
an-apps-domain-email-address into an actual google apps account, and I had to
move my Reader data.

------
sdiwakar
Hi HN, my co-founder and I have been working on a Google Reader clone in the
last few weeks, we're not quite ready to launch, but would love to get
feedback as soon as we've opened up our beta:

<http://beta.newsmaven.co>

We promise to have all the basics of Google Reader covered, including
importing your feed data (or as much as possible through the API).

Of course, if you're looking for something to move to immediately, NewsBlur is
an awesome product :)

------
anigbrowl
_While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined._

That will happen if you stop developing it and ignore requests for new
features. Conesus has done a good job with Newsblur and I'll try going back to
that, but I really wanted to have Gmail-style filtering of my RSS feeds in
Google Reader, to to mention being able to maintain my sharing/tracking data
within the Google ecosystem.

This is a major failure on Google's part. Complaining about a declining user
base when the product was left to stagnate amounts to blaming the users for
the company's lack of vision. Why Google would want to abandon this extremely
rich source of behavorial data and trend emergence is beyond me; it suggests a
loss of direction, for which short-term reactivity is no substitute. Put
another way, you can't lead the herd by following it faster. I am shocked.

As I say, I've used Newsblur before and thought it OK - at the time I just
somewhat preferred Reader's cosmetics. So the above is not just a reaction to
the necessity to switch platforms.

------
beilabs
So I love Google Reader, been using it from the very beginning.

I love offline clients, quite often I'm stuck in a remote location where 3G
has yet to penetrate so I like to have a couple of hundred items to read which
will sync when I reach connectivity again.

I need the RSS service to track what I've read across multiple devices and
have the client support offline usage. Any recommendations?

~~~
LoganCale
This is the primary reason I use Google Reader too. I don't use the web
interface at all, I just use it to keep track of everything so I can sync with
it when I reconnect later, long after a number of items have disappeared
forever from the official RSS feeds of active sites.

------
Kylekramer
Bummer. I imagine there will be a few decent alternatives, but if the biggest
game in RSS reader town is shutting down, how long will websites continue to
provide and expose RSS feeds to the public?

~~~
zanny
What other syndication mechanism works, is cross platform, portable, provides
rich media, and is open?

~~~
Kylekramer
None that I know of. But the question remains is whether websites will want to
provide a syndication mechanism similar to RSS. Google apparently thinks that
it isn't worth maintaining and they are just the ones aggregating the feeds.
RSS feeds won't die and will definitely be used in various niches such as
podcasting. But if RSS feeds are losing popularity as Google claims, I am
worried about their future. Combined with the fact they are probably harder to
monetize, I would not be surprised if their days are numbered on most common
websites. And that sucks, cause RSS readers always felt like using a cheat
code on the internet and I don't find anything that replaces it to my
satisfaction.

------
jws
I'll take the blame for this.

I use Google Reader heavily, but I never go to the web pages. I have native
apps on my desktop and mobile devices and just use Reader to keep my
subscriptions synced.

No ad views, no service.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
If that was a problem, they should've offered paid subscriptions. I refuse to
see ads, but I'll happily pay for the privilege.

I find the Google Reader web interface to be dreadful and ugly, so I never go
there except to manage my RSS feeds. Third party devs have created newsreader
apps so much better than Google did, it's not even funny.

~~~
pohl
_If that was a problem, they should've offered paid subscriptions._

Yeah, but they don't want us as customers, they want to sell us as Soylent
Green out the back door.

With this news, the only remaining things I'll use Google for are search,
GMail, and some libraries like Guice & Guava.

~~~
tracker1
That's more than me.. without iGoogle and Reader, I don't see much use in them
for search now.

------
phasevar
I depend on Google Reader for keeping up with Hacker News. I'm going to be in
a world of hurt now. I use iReadG on the iPhone to browse headings and then
star the Hacker News posts I want to read later when I get back to the
computer.

iReadG has been great because it will download all the rss feed data and allow
me to browser it and star items without an Internet connection which is great
for those times on the road when there is no signal. I have no idea what I'll
be able to use to replicate this functionality now that Google Reader is going
down.

Very very sad.

------
beambot
Does anyone know of an extraction tool to pull down all your starred items (in
addition to feeds) into some semi-structured format -- even just a big, single
HTML file?

I've got YEARS of starred items "saved" in Reader. I use it everyday to stay
abreast of news (1000+ items / day). Between Google Reader and iGoogle...
Google has deprecated most of the tools I use on a regular basis. This makes
me seriously question using Gmail and Apps for Business.

EDIT: Just RTFM'd. Looks like Google TakeOut will let me export most of the
stuff I care about. Still, this sucks. I'll probably just keep using it and
hope (like iGoogle) the deprecation date gets pushed back. Otherwise...
productivity boon due to lack of RSS feeds.

Also.... Feedburner users should see the writing on the wall!

------
ambirex
Perhaps the "decline in usage" had something to do with the thoughtless
redesign they implemented.

~~~
TheCowboy
It might have been in the decline before that point, but I did stop using it
because of the redesign hurting my eyes and being less of a pleasure to
interact with. It's really a shame because it was a service a lot of people
enjoyed. There was no need to force one look on every user.

I can't imagine the likely demographic profile of Google Reader users was
worthless to a company that sells targeted ads as well.

------
ececconi
Say it ain't so. I use this everyday at work on my text only internet browser.

This is the first internet product shutdown I've ever been affected by.

Maybe I don't need to spend so much time reading up on random news. Who knows,
it might be good for me.

But I will miss you.

~~~
pseut
If you're text only already, check out newsbeuter.

------
jjsz
Alternative list on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/Google-Reader/What-are-the-
current-mult...](http://www.quora.com/Google-Reader/What-are-the-current-
multiplatform-2013-besides-the-ones-listed-below-alternatives-to-Google-
Reader-where-I-can-transfer-my-starred-items-feeds-and-unread-items-In-
response-to-A-second-spring-of-cleaning?__snids__=105010833&__nsrc__=5)

------
knurdle
I'm really sad to see it go, it's the one service I use more than anything
else. Probably more than email.

------
talleyrand
Well, this is truly the apocalypse. To me, Google Reader IS the
internet.....(It's how I got to this Hacker News post). Not pleased at all.

------
crucialfelix
bastards. they never seem to realize how much they damage our trust with these
actions. it effects all of their future products. I don't trust them anymore.

anyway feedly has a replacement coming soon:

<http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/>

> We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of
> the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader
> shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So
> if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the
> transition will be seamless.

> If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will
> be able to migrate seamlesly

~~~
alex_doom
Their site is getting crushed right now. I can't even login.

~~~
baszero
<http://www.feedly.com/> perfectly works right now. With four clicks you find
all your feed groups again you had in Google Reader and the User Interface is
even nicer...

I think the most important feature for any alternative is the import of the
Google Reader's feeds and structure including all tags!

------
zeitg3ist
Sad, sad news. I get (I think) 300 items/day on my Google Reader and I
_always_ get to "inbox zero" - a bit of OCD maybe. It is my most visited URL
ever and I've used it every day, several times a day, since 2006. Of course I
would even pay a fair amount of money for it, given the time I've spent on it,
but Google's not interested. I am currently trying The Old Reader and while
the interface is nice (well... generic Bootstrap, which is pleasant, and
better than newsblur) it's really slow with my amount of feeds. Sigh...

------
doe88
Well done, it affects me a lot, it was one of two services I'm totally
dependant from Google. The second one is Gmail, if I wasn't so lazy I would
try to do something about it too, I'm not confortable with my mails stored at
Google / in the US anymore.

------
Danieru
One not mentioned yet is <http://selfoss.aditu.de/>

It is an open source self hosted rss reader with a responsive skin. I'll be
migrating tonight nad since it is open source I can contribute when I run into
issues!

------
AndrewDucker
Okay. So I need a replacement website that also has an Android app. And
preferably a desktop app (or syncs with FeedDemon).

Any suggestions?

~~~
mikevm
FeedDemon is dead: [http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-
feeddemon.ht...](http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-
feeddemon.html)

------
jessaustin
I won't bitch about this decision, because after all I got more than my
money's worth. I do wonder if the change doesn't weaken the whole Google
"Suite" though. Google (until quite recently anyway) seems to be focusing a
great deal on G+. The vast majority of my G+ posts come from Reader; I doubt
I'll be posting to G+ in future. I know G+ can live without me, but as far as
I can tell the only value in G+ comes from its integration with the rest of
the "Suite". If Facebook or Amazon had been in this situation, instead of
killing Reader, they would have focused it more and more on feeding,
promoting, and otherwise bolstering their other services, probably to the
detriment of actually reading RSS. Probably to the point where some, _but not
all_ users would have become disgusted and quit using Reader anyway. Google
doesn't do that sort of thing, which I guess is to its credit.

------
mattbarrie
I'm here with Alan Noble who runs engineering at Google Australia and ran the
Google Reader project until 18 months ago. They looked at open sourcing it but
it was too much effort to do so because it's tied to closely to Google
infrastructure. Basically it's been culled due to long term declining use.

------
orionlogic
I have thousands of websites inside Google Reader which serves me as a
personal sub-internet. With archive and quick search within feeds was so much
valuable for me. It was the only service of Google that i use second only to
Gmail.

I think they made a quick short headed cost analysis in this, that archive and
search functionality needs server power. Actual userbase does not provide
enough money juice to balance.

Now, let the alternatives pour in.

~~~
mxfh
Exactly that.

My worst fear: Just couldn't find any service yet that provides this search
capability in your very private hand-selected little back-catalog of the
internet back to 2007 and earlier. Including sites that are no longer
available in the wild. Nobody else will be able to provide that without access
to the Google Reader Servers.

Hope this current uproar gets enough traction to find a solution to save this
searchable and indexed archive of the internet/blogosphere somewhere
accessible for everyone.

------
reefab
There is a whole app ecosystem built around Google Reader. This is going to be
ugly.

I actually it daily but only through apps like Reeder.

~~~
miker64
Yeah, I'm far more worried about the fact that pretty much all the iOS rss
readers use Google Reader as a backend.

I'm going to be fubar for keeping different apps across devices all in sync...

------
jayeff
I do hope this is a blessing in disguise!

Google killed with their free Reader the biggest part of the market around
RSS. Switching off Reader opens up this market which should be still large
enough for a few indies to find their niche. Maybe even reinvigorating RSS
while doing so.

------
nbashaw
<http://bringgooglereaderback.com/>

------
fractalsea
This is my most used Google service after the search and mail (it's probably
on par with Youtube). Shame to see it go! I can't see how it was hurting them
so much with users declining. Surely the more time staring at the Google
website header the better?

------
callil
Still he best way to read content on the web, really sad to see it go.

Adding on to this:

What he hell do I do with my starred items now, it's literally the best
collection of content I have curated in my life and I reference it all the
time.

edit: petition to keep it open [http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-
don-t-kill-goo...](http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-don-t-kill-
google-reader)

~~~
josh-j
You can export your Google Reader data -- all your starred items are stored in
a json file.

~~~
jjsz
It doesn't pass unread items though.

~~~
josh-j
Another option is to get pocket for chrome which adds an icon to google reader
items and thereby allowing you to save your starred items to pocket.

------
kingoftheintern
Literally my favorite thing on the internet. Revolutionized how I consume
information. I found out about this via Google Reader!

Google has fallen very far.

------
skilesare
I'm stunned. I was depending on this service to document my life and what I
know. I simply can't fathom that they are going to shut it off. If this
happens I'm going to move everything I have on google off of it. I put too
much trust in them for them to pull this crap. This is an evil move. It exudes
evil. It damages my productivity and steals my time. Ughhhh.

------
hiddentaco
I literally said "Awwww, whaaaat?".

<http://tt-rss.org> as a replacement seems the winner for me so far.

------
ayushgta
NewsBlur may have a solution for end users but there seems to be no recourse
for the huge impact this has to the dev community.

With Google Reader as an API devs had a way to get historical data on
practically any RSS feed going back many years. That ability will be lost/gone
forever. Even if Google sunsets the reader app, I wish they'd keep this data
source open. Its hugely valuable and I don't think there is any alternative to
it.

I think that having cached all this data on their server over the years of
their own free will, they've put themselves to be in a position where they
have a somewhat fiduciary responsibility of keeping this data alive and open.

~~~
pauljonas
^^This.

Any new application starts in a state of _tabula rasa_ \-- all history, prior
to some point in 2013 (or late 2012) will not be accessible, considering that
a typical site/blog feed contains only 10 to a few dozen most recent items.
Presently, in Google Reader, I can click on a feed and flip through items all
the way back to 2005 (for those sites with that long of a history).

I know that Google Reader search has been flaky as the product has languished,
but it still the most powerful way to search a select group you sites you care
about (incidentally, the Google Labs custom search engine product is on life
support too, if not set to sunset soon) and search for a topical phrase of
interest and get a set of results with that matching text.

------
oracuk
This is affecting me similarly to the announcement of Yahoo killing Delicious.
Both Delicious and Google reader became for me definitions of their services.
As a result of this all alternatives do not feel right (Even if they're
technically more full featured).

I have swapped Delicious with Diigo (After shopping around many alternatives).
I really hope the process of replacing Google reader isn't as long or as
painful as that was.

The ending of Delicious and Google Reader is the end of an era of my use of
the Internet. I wonder if it's a function of my age that I now see that as a
sad and worrying development rather than an opportunity to be grasped.

------
signed0
While I am an avid Google Reader user, I think this is good news. Their
product has stagnated over the past few years, yet few competitors emerged.
Hopefully this creates a void that a better service or set of services can
fill.

~~~
Semaphor
Sadly most of the services fill a different niche. Feedly and so on are all
_magazines_ but not what I consider real RSS readers. I've read though this
Thread, the Reddit threads and through some "Reader Alternatives" articles.
The only things similar seem to be The Old Reader and Newsblur.

~~~
mkr-hn
Feedly has a very familiar view for Reader users:
[http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-
use...](http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-users-
migrating-to-feedly/)

I've been using that view since the Reader announcement prompted me to give
Feedly a second look. Works perfectly.

------
trts
I can use another RSS Reader (and probably won't like it nearly as much as
Google Reader), but I worry that the Google Reader audience is so big, and
that so many will likely not bother finding another worthy RSS aggregator,
that some blogs who get most of their traffic from GR users will throw in the
towel when their readership declines.

------
ericcoleman
I've used it every day for years... Anyone run an instance of
<http://www.feedafever.com>? How is it?

~~~
owenwil
I use Fever full time. It's great, apart from the lack of native apps. That's
the only thing that makes me resent it sometime. Their claims are true, too,
it really does help cut back the noise and stops you reading the same story
over and over. It's kind of nice to know that I own it, too, so nobody can
just take it away.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Unless you mean 'native app made by Fever', Reeder and Sunstroke [2] are good
iOS apps with Fever support.

[1] <https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/reeder/id325502379>

[2] <https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sunstroke/id488564806>

------
vosechu_
I'm seriously digging Feedly right now. Took 12 seconds to get into it and
everything just makes sense. I wish I had found this ages ago.

No need to backup your feeds, it uses your google account for now.

~~~
dbcooper
Feedly posted this to their blog today:

<http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/>

Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly

Google Reader Posted on March 14, 2013 by @feedly

Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is
something we have been expecting from some time: We have been working on a
project called Normandy which is a clone of the Google Reader API – running on
Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly
transition to the Normandie back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and
using feedly, you are covered.

~~~
oskee80
Tangent: How on earth do product blogs not have a link to their product page?
Nowhere is there a link to feedly.com in their header or sidebar, I have to
manually edit the URL. Ridiculous.

------
cdjk
There's tt-rss [1] if you want to host it yourself.

[1] <http://tt-rss.org/>

~~~
EvanAnderson
I'm glad I made the decision to host my own feed reader years ago. Mine's
based on an old version of tt-rss, actually (I diverged from the codebase back
in '05 when I felt like the author didn't really want any of my
contributions).

Edit: It looks like I'm also happy that I chose to host my own CalDAV server,
too.

Edit 2: @koenigdavidmj - Apparently I can't reply that deeply. DAViCal is the
CalDAV server I'm using (<http://www.davical.org/>). My wife and I sync our
iPhones to it and it's been a godsend for my personal organization. (Now if I
could just find a decent replacement for Mozilla Sunbird...)

~~~
mjs
Are they really shutting down the CalDAV interface to Google Calendar? (I'm
not sure what the "API" bit means, or the "whitelisted".)

As of now, CalDAV is Google's recommended way for syncing with iOS devices
[http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...](http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674)

~~~
tensor
This is my concern too. I was under the impression that iCal also used CalDAV
to sync. Why shut it down?

~~~
MrScruff
It's worse than that. On iOS Google have just shut down exchange support (for
new users), which was how I was syncing calendars up until now. If they pull
caldav support as well, there will be no syncing mechanism available to iOS
users, unless I'm missing something.

------
antirez
I wonder if it's just a Google Reader issue or RSS are fading out. I'm not a
huge RSS user but I would be very concerned by RSS decline, it was one of the
rare inter-operation standard that was very positive, easy, clean, and helped
a lot programmers to put things together.

~~~
frou_dh
It's bugged me when I've seen people say that Twitter replaces RSS. In my
eyes, RSS is for feeds where you actually care about each item and the
decision whether or not to read it. Twitter is catered towards dipping in and
out, with items constantly slipping through the net.

------
plinkplonk
The real winner here might be Prismatic. They already do awesome machine
learning based discovery. If they'd add an RSS _reader_ (not just RSS feeds
into their discovery machine) they'll get every one of millions of users
moving off Google Reader.

Due Disclosure: Though I have no official connection to Prismatic, founder
Bradford Cross is a friend and I am biased to Prismatic. It is awesome. Try it
at <http://getprismatic.com/>

~~~
k_bx
While I like prismatic a lot, it builds on idea of a filtering bubble that you
put yourself into. So it's better for finding something that you'll be
interested in and you already know that (since it's in your interests, and
your friends quote on that), but it's absolutely orthogonal to rss reader.

------
icebraining
If you want a light and simple reader with a similar UI, try Tiny Tiny RSS.
It's self-hosted, so it won't stop working when it's no longer "profitable",
and it has all the basic features (folders, keyboard navigation, etc) without
clutter. I've been really happy with it since I switched from GReader, a few
months ago.

<http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki>

------
pbreit
Wow, very surprising. One of the few Google apps I access several times per
day.

Edit: I think there's a 50/50 chance this decision gets reversed.

Edit: looks like <http://feedly.com> is going to get my vote for now.

------
pasbesoin
Lessons for the week: It's not yours unless it's 1) On your machine [a], and
2) DRM free.

\--

[a] As long as your machine remains "yours", i.e. free of the same
restrictions.

~~~
zanny
I just exported my Greader profile into Akregator. Now to research if someone
wrote an import of reader favorites JSON, or if I should just write the
extension myself.

------
talleyrand
Basically every Reader-alternative site is getting its servers slammed
tonight. This makes me wonder about Reader's "declining usage."

~~~
mikevm
You don't see all the data...

------
owencm
I've started a Slant comparison page for Google Reader replacements, hopefully
we can crowd source a good, feature-by-feature comparison of the replacement
apps to help decide. [http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-alternative-to-
googl...](http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-alternative-to-google-
reader/opinions/the-old-reader)

------
tvchurch
I'd urge everyone to give Readertron (readertron.com) a try. It was built by
programmer (and good friend of mine) who was frustrated when Google nerfed the
ability to share among friends within Google Reader. It's a work in progress,
but at least you can share articles among friends again.

He's also very responsive to requests for features.

~~~
Ziomislaw
uhg! tried it. after signing in I was presented with a "You are already
subscribed to the following shared feeds." and two pages of random people I've
never even heard about. I strongly advise against it.

------
dbcooper
Come on Microsoft, this is a good opportunity for you - Bing Reader. Make it
happen.

~~~
sp332
The Windows Live Mail app has a feed reader. I wonder how hard it would really
be to add the functionality to the web-app version of outlook.com.

------
lispython
Reeder, my favorite iOS and Mac news app, that includes support for Fever
(<http://feedafever.com/>), a news aggregation and evaluation service I’ve
always wanted to try. If you are looking to leave Google Reader, this may be
the combination you’re looking for.

------
Yhippa
Wow this one hurts. They took down another Google service I loved, Google
Notebook (<http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html>). I have no idea why
I loved it. It was just so easy to make lots of quick text documents without
the fluff and it was fast. I used it despite the existence of Evernote and
other online documentation services. I still haven't found a suitable
replacement though OneNote comes real close.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this. I guess the reality is that
social won and RSS is dead. Or at least social is much more monetizable.

I've tried so many other different RSS aggregators but kept coming back to
Google Reader. It worked well, had minimal fluff, and was fast.

R.I.P. Google Reader

------
mdesq
I spend more actual time in Reader than any other Google application including
Gmail. This bites.

I'm open to alternatives, but I haven't seen any I could really latch on to.

------
vijayboyapati
It's unfair for Google to claim usage has been decreasing since it broke the
social aspect of Greader (which was the part I loved the most) which I think
is a major factor in declining usage. I definitely saw less content that my
friends on Greader used to share. My usage of the product dropped after that,
but it was still useful enough I wanted to keep using it. This is probably one
of the most shameful episodes in google product history. I bet they're
rationalizing away all the feedback from upset users too. They should at least
let someone spin off the product into a startup. Most startups would die to
have the user base of Google reader. Just because Google doesn't care about
it, doesn't mean there is no market to be served.﻿

------
flingbob
I've been working on a replacement for a year now. It's open to the public.
Get it while it's hot

<http://1kpl.us/>

~~~
tomedme
Thank you!

------
laserDinosaur
I use Google Reader for one very simple reason - I'm already signed into
Google. It's on my phone, it's on all my computers . I don't want to have to
use yet another bloody website just to manage something as simple as an RSS
feed. I like Reader because it as simple, it worked and it was everywhere I
needed it. The fact that it's retiring just because people are not using it is
a misconception - I've managed to get a fairly large number of people using
Google Reader, none of which had ANY idea it existed before. As a few others
have said in the thread, the "declined usage" is no fault of the product
itself but through absolutely no promotion of it from Google.

------
vowelless
This is going to be a huge pain for me. There was a decent infrastructure
built on top of google reader (not only apps that let you log in and view your
feeds on different devices). I constantly use ifttt to send starred articles
to my evernote.

~~~
icebraining
Since IFTTT can consume any RSS feed, you can just use any client that lets
you export your starred articles as one, such as Tiny Tiny RSS.

I have a similar use case, where I want to automatically download chosen
podcasts. I just created a "download" label, got an RSS feed link from my
client and put it on a podcasting app. Now I just need to label the episodes I
want to listen to on Tiny and they'll be automatically downloaded to my phone.

------
olefoo
May I say, Aaeaarrghhhhhhhhh! This was ( I speak in the past tense, even
though death does not happen until July 1st ) one of the few reliable
guideposts about the internet.

Google reader,of the RSS readers, you were the best, reliable, unencumbered by
partisanship, unflavored by ideology. You were the best. Too bad, I must say
goodbye, too bad I must go to newsbeuter or some other webreader, too bad you
must die.

Truly I hate google, I hate what Google has become, I love the web, I love
what the web was supposed to be. I love RSS <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS>
and I will mourn you when you are gone.

------
ececconi
I guess they couldn't monetize RSS. I would have taken an ad-supported
version. Nobody would probably click the ads though.

~~~
zanny
You can easily monetize RSS, you can get some of the best information about a
person about the content they _consistently_ subscribe to. All their targeted
advertising would have been all the better targeted at people if they
intelligently used their subscription information.

------
ivanmaeder
Beware! This app is a gazillion times simpler than Google Reader.

I'm putting this out there in case anybody finds it useful. I made it years
ago but never got around to promoting it. The idea was an online bookmarking
app that tells you when the bookmarked pages have changed, and for technical
reasons it eventually turned into a simple news feed reader.

It also supports drag and drop and for browsers with side bars (damn you
Chrome!), it works... in the side bar.

I've moved onto other things but if you're really into it, get in touch and
I'll try to move your data from Google Reader.

<http://bookmarkchamp.com/>

------
uladzislau
List of Google Reader alternatives [http://alternativeto.net/software/google-
reader/?platform=on...](http://alternativeto.net/software/google-
reader/?platform=online&license=free)

~~~
olegp
Also: <https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader>

------
dbcooper
Damn. Reader was very useful for keeping up with academic journals and
flagging articles for further consideration.

------
aheilbut
Are there any alternative sources of archival RSS feeds like those that Google
Reader (unofficially) provides?

~~~
icebraining
What's an archival RSS feed?

~~~
zanny
Greader will preserve its own history of a feed, including deleted items and
feeds that go down, given _someone_ on the Internet was accessing it, Google
caches it.

It means when a website is taken offline, if you are subscribed to, say, a
content RSS feed through them, you can still browse the history and content.

I just switched to Akregator, which will locally cache feeds (and you can
configure it to do so permanantly) but it is a local copy. You can host your
feeds via a feed host through it, so I imagine what I'm going to do is run
Akregator off my server box, archive my feeds, and access it from my servers
ip.

~~~
icebraining
Oh, well, I've name-dropped it a few times already, but TTRSS stories every
item in its database. I've used it to run some numbers on them.

~~~
aheilbut
The beauty of this aspect of google reader though is that they have archived
every feed that anyone has read in the past 5+ years, and there's actually an
API to retrieve that data as RSS/Atom.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Sounds like somebody should send out the signal to Archive Team and Jason
Scott.

------
deerpig
Let me see how I can delicately sum up my feelings about this: "Google, you
Bastard!"

I think they announced this while the news cycle is wall-to-wall New Pope
Mania to cover up this appalling summery execution :)

------
MrBlue
Yet another example why I never built a service or app relying on any Google
product, service or API.

------
mattchew
This is going to be a problem. Reader is fairly important to me.

I'm dropping Google a note and offering to pay a subscription if they continue
services. Probably won't make a dent, but worth a try.

------
mayneack
Obligatory White House petition: <http://wh.gov/oRoJ>

------
ohwp
I created a poll to keep track of the best alternative:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538>

------
Matsta
Why are they shutting it down? I mean heaps of people must still use it. I bet
a shit load of people use for Google Alerts as well, lots of businesses.

Far if it costed too much, i bet people would be happy to fork out $10 a year
for it?

I've been using it daily for the past 4 years, to be honest nothing comes that
close to it, and most likely the majority of people who use RSS readers use
Google Reader.

Also now most of the iOS/Android apps are fucked now since they all use Google
Reader.

Tldr; Google are dongies.

~~~
duncan_bayne
> Why are they shutting it down?

Because they would rather that you use Google+. The writing was on the wall
when they started disabling features a year or two ago.

~~~
pan69
How are you supposed to use RSS with G+? Wouldn't that be a mess?

~~~
duncan_bayne
Sorry, I was unclear; I meant use G+ instead of RSS feeds.

~~~
pan69
But that wouldn't be up to me, that would be up the feed publishers to use G+
instead of RSS. :)

------
nakedrobot2
Alright Google, I'll make a deal with you:

Keep Reader alive and I'll CONSIDER using G+

Until then, I'm not going to touch you.

------
webwanderings
First word came out of my mouth looking at this in Google Reader of course is,
FUCK!

------
DrinkWater
i was especially interested in the history function of Google Reader. i could
look up old items even if they were not starred, it was enough if they passed
through Google Reader.

And there is no option to save this data. Or is there?

------
beryllium
I use NetNewsWire (an iOS app) every day, and it interfaces with Google Reader
very nicely. Very sad that Google has made this decision - I will have to look
into the alternatives. Hopefully they are even better! :)

Edit/Update: I'm probably part of the problem. I never click ads - maybe they
just had too many freeloaders like me? :) Weirdly, I also never block ads. I
just don't click them.

------
faithful_droog
I (and it seems a lot of others) will be sad to see reader go.

I presume this death announcement doesn't meet the criteria for a HN black
banner though.

------
whitehat2k9
I'm a huge fan of Netvibes - been using it for several years now. It has a
single feed based view like most other RSS readers, but in my opinion the
newspaper view is where it shines. I can quickly skim several dozen feeds with
the scroll of a mouse - it's great if you're the kind of person who likes to
take in a lot of info at once.

------
i4i
I love Reader and hate that it's going away. A pox on Plus I say.

------
forgotAgain
I wonder if bit by bit ending secondary products like this doesn't separate
Google from its customers. Part of my reason for not using search services
like Bing is that I'm tied to Google by their secondary products such as
Reader. The end of Reader will loosen Google's hold on me. As will the end of
iGoogle.

------
przemoc
I used to use Google Reader. Feed count rose and rose to the point I stopped
using it. For many many months I'm checking only LWN and HN sites manually for
CS/IT-related stuff - I don't feel like I lost anything. So cannot really
complain about losing Google Reader now, but I think that this decease
decision is strange.

I may reevaluate feed idea when I see intelligent reader that will show me
early the most interesting stories from my subscriptions and will do it with a
style. Reading must be a pleasure, not pain. Typographically web is a horrible
place, there is so much that can and should be improved. Feeds should be your
better (i.e. correctly) looking versions of the texts you can find on the web.

Google Reader Plus extension improved a bit comfort of using GR, thanks to
multi-column view for instance, but it wasn't enough to keep me using GR.

------
Llothy
This is very sad. :-( That's like 3 hours of my day every day.

------
mcgwiz
Google is betting on Google+ being the future platform for general content
publishing and consumption, so RSS in general, and Google Reader in
particular, are effectively competitors of Google+. I wouldn't be surprised if
Blogger was shutdown (or subsumed by Google+) 5 years from now.

------
mspseudolus
We think RSS is far from dead. We've built a free reader that lets you put
your feeds into a magazine style, highly visual page: Kuratur.com

This isn't a traditional email-inbox-style feed reader. It's like Flipboard
for your feeds, on the web.

In beta - feedback warmly welcomed.

Also, very interested in talking to RSS fanatics.

------
programminggeek
This is another reminder that if Google does a service for free, there is
likely a business to be had in making a paid version, simply for the
inevitable moment that they kill the free service. Think paid Google+, paid
GMail, paid search engine maybe? You get the idea.

------
krcz
Is there a RSS reader which incorporates some ML learning algorithms to
determine which articles I'd probably like, basing on what others (ones having
similar taste) click? That was only thing that would make me abandon Google
Reader if it weren't closing anyway.

~~~
platz
I think newsblur supports some kind of training after looking at it today; not
sure how effective it is.

------
villesundberg
I think we all saw this coming when G+ took over some of Reader's
functionality.

I've been working on a news solution of my own, Scoopinion, since 2011. It's a
discovery engine that ranks articles based on how closely they've been read.
Users install a browser extension that lets them track their own reading
(within a set of whitelisted sites). It's a little bit of quantified self for
news. The data is used for recommendations and to help journalists in their
work.

It's not a drop-in replacement for Reader since you don't get the full
firehose of headlines from your feeds, only the most engaging stories.

<https://www.scoopinion.com>

------
idont
This is such a sad news for lots of specialized website (including Google
blogs!!!). For sure they will see some trafic impact. BTW, Google+ is too much
time consuming per unit of information read, so I will never replace Reader by
Plus.

------
mieses
This is a disaster for Google. Elites are mobile. The empire collapses after
they leave.

------
mkr-hn
HN deaded this when I tried to submit it:
<http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network>

I don't know why. It's a great eulogy for Reader, written in 2012.

~~~
wglb
I think buzzfeed gets automatically marked dead.

~~~
mkr-hn
That's unfortunate. It has a lot of quality content mixed with the revenue-
generating pop stuff.

------
sideproject
whoa. big move. can we somehow petition against this? and maybe even move this
off as an alternative open source, driven by community? Whack some ads on
Google Reader and you might make money out of it Google... but don't remove
this.

~~~
zanny
Well, I just exported my entire feed history to Akregator. It imported
smoothly. I'm probably going to look into a qt 5.1 based port of it to Android
if someone isn't already making it just so I can have my feeds on the go as
well.

 _That_ is my biggest concern, I really like the UX of the mobile reader app
for browsing blog entries.

------
mladenkovacevic
This affects me in a huge way. I spend at least a couple of hours in Reader
every day. I'd even be ok if they found a way to integrate Reader into Google+
in a more than just a superficial way and somehow and made it super social.
They seem to be hellbent on making Google+ work.. so here's a perfect way to
make me spend more time there! Make Google Authorship work with Greader then
allow me to follow specific authors and get only their RSS feeds (instead of
blanket following whole websites). Use G+ as a commenting system behind my RSS
subscriptions, giving Disqus a run for its money. Ugh so many possibilities...
:(

------
mindprince
I would gladly pay for Google Reader. It is my most visited website. This is
so sad.

------
presty
what the fuck google? seriously, I'm really pissed with this.

~~~
presty
really, how is one's reading habits not useful data for google? you're sitting
on a pile of gold. it's a billion times more valuable than the useless google
plus desert!

------
mkr-hn
I saw NewsBlur when it first popped up on HN but never gave it thought since I
thought Reader served my needs well enough. Amazing how that inertia melts
away when the floor vanishes.

Now I just have to wait for its servers to stop melting.

------
gyrccc
use it daily. Would be nice if Google released details on this "decline in
usage"

~~~
infogulch
Agreed, and agreed.

------
lunchladydoris
Only word one suffices: Fuck!

------
bsg75
Thankfully this will mean that the trend of news reader apps that consume
Google feeds instead of the actual sources will end. Some of the current ones
will die off, but maybe a few of the better will convert.

------
mcovey
If anyone wants the direct export link instead of using takeout, this still
works:

<https://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export?hl=en>

------
nreece
Here are some hand-picked, noteworthy alternatives:
[http://blog.feedity.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-
alternative...](http://blog.feedity.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-
alternatives/)

------
vijayboyapati
Can someone explain to me why no one is doing a direct, pixel for pixel clone
of Google Reader? I mean, the thing is popular enough that any startup would
die for its traffic. Not to mention its users absolutely love it. As Paul
Bucheit said, it's better to have a small number of users who love your
product than a large number that like it. And well, Greader has a large number
of users who love it (bordering on fanatical about it). So why not do a
blatant clone as a f* you to Google for nuking a product that its users are
absolutely devoted to.

~~~
srean
While not quite pixel to pixel oldreader seems to be quite close, they want to
be close to the older UI which makes it even better in my eyes. They are sort
of keeling over with the new load, but have scheduled an import, will see how
it goes. Unfortunaately as of now they only import the subscriptions not he
stars.

Not sure how they plan to support the service.

------
pilooch
Just thought I would mention that you can use XPLR unsupervised machine
learning API <https://xplr.com/developers/> to build your own feed reader in
the manner of <https://xplr.com/products/illuminate/browser/> Though this
probably applies more to RSS reader developers than end users. In a way, you
can build your own little Prismatic-like app, tailored to your needs, or just
play with AI and news :)

------
smnl
Seemed like this would eventually happen since Google stopped updating Reader
(and its APIs) a few years ago

I've also been working on a similar news reader app called BlogRoll:
<http://blogrollapp.com>

It can import your Google Reader feeds and has a tiled layout (which may not
be everybody's cup of tea), but it works well for photo-focused sites like
food and fashion blogs, and it handles other news sites and blogs quite well
too.

Here's a screenshot of it: <http://bit.ly/Yc1P9C>

------
shawnbaden
+1 on first Google service shutdown that impacts me. I use Reader daily.

------
trevorhartman
If you haven't already used it, check out <http://getprismatic.com/>. It
replaced Google Reader for me. (It also replaced HN for the most part).

------
siromoney
I'm building an alternative (<https://feedreader.co>) and would like
volunteers to test it. The focus is on reading
(<https://feedreader.co/arpith/labels/read> should give you an idea) so it's
much simpler than newsblur, etc, but the front end is built using a feed sync
API (<https://feedreader.co/api>) which I think will be useful.

------
Amarandei
Instead of wasting your time creating petitions to keep Google Reader open, I
suggest you make a petition to make Google Reader open source. Google is going
to close Reader either way so at least we'd haven a self hosted good
alternative.

Every alternative I've seen so far in this hole topic(yes, all of them, I've
tested all of them) is either poorly designed, bad UX, weird browser problems
or trying too hard to be more then a RSS reader. Guess I'll just have to spend
2 days and build my own. Oh, well :)

------
threepipeproblm
I wonder if Google has accounted for the effect of people who have been burned
by coming to rely on a product that was yanked becoming reluctant to use
Google products in the future?

------
thelah
Joining in on the disapproval of Google's move here, as I use it constantly
all day everyday! Here's to hoping this public cry might change Google's
decision to axe it...

------
polochon
I am using KrISS Feed, <https://github.com/tontof/kriss_feed> If you speak
French, a little help here: [http://tontof.net/?2013/03/14/18/12/56-presque-
nouveau-lecte...](http://tontof.net/?2013/03/14/18/12/56-presque-nouveau-
lecteur-rss-kriss-feed-est-vraiment-tout-terrain) and a demo there:
<http://tontof.net/feed>

------
baszero
FEEDLY has done a great job: \- with 4 clicks you find ALL feeds with \- ALL
feed groups / folders \- ALL tags are imported \- you even have the complete
HISTORY of all feeds again \- it is SYNCHED REALTIME with your Google Reader
account: if you "like" a post in feedly, you instantly also have a "star" in
Google Reader.

Any alternative discussed here should have this import and SYNC feature,
otherwise it is useless.

<http://www.feedly.com/>

------
dpeck
This is just a delayed press release, reader was killed 2 years ago with the
release of google+ that removed the amazing social/sharing features that made
it special.

------
draegtun
I use Google Reader a lot so this is a shame|sad|annoying :(

Still this video "Hitler finds out Gooder Reader is shutting down" at least
put a broad smile back on my face :)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A25VgNZD...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A25VgNZDQ08)

(via Dave Winer tweet -
<https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/312049161677713408>)

------
jtgeibel
I thought of this exact situation just last night when subscribing to a feed.

Firefox sent me to a google page which offered me an option to add it to
either iGoogle or Reader. I recalled that iGoogle is being shut-down and
thought it was strange that it was still offered as a prominent option. I
guess now it makes sense.

I seems strange to me though that Reader will be shut down before iGoogle,
which is slated for November 1, 2013.

------
benubois
Here's another good Google Reader alternative. <https://feedbin.me>.

It's a new reader with a similar experience to NetNewsWire. It costs $2/month
but there is a free 3 day trial. I created Feedbin because I was looking for
an alternative to Google Reader that's simpler than what's already out there.
No social junk, no ads, no content discovery. Just an RSS reader.

------
dogada
A year ago near last Google Reader redesign I made my own online RSS-reader
<http://www.cliws.com/> and now don't care.

We should less depend on the large corporations. The idea about I think last
time is that we need some kind of distributed Twitter (like we have perfectly
worked distributed email now).

If you can't replace one tool with another you are in trouble definitely.

------
devesh
It’s sad to see google killing one of the most useful service. Though, there’s
a petition going on to keep the Google Reader running
[https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-
reader-r...](https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-
running) and more than 40k+ people have signed it.

If Google still decides to kill the service, I am going to use Feedly ;).

------
mikestew
It looks like a bit of work to set up, but I might just adjust how I digest
things and give this a shot: <http://tabs.mediahackers.org>. "Rivers" probably
aren't going to have the archiving and what not that Google Reader or others
will have (maybe, haven't looked that deeply) but most stuff I just read, or
not, and move on.

------
nbertram
Thats funny... I found this post on google reader.

------
crusso
Crap, after years of avoiding RSS, yesterday I found a blog that I wanted to
follow.

I signed up for Google Reader...

Sorry, folks - I may have caused the shut-down.

------
cmatteson
Though we focus more on industry/professional news, Delve (delvenews.com) just
launched Google Reader integration. Now you can sync your data and we'll pull
in sources, generate topics and turn your folders into 'channels' for fast
news filtering. It's free to use Delve as an individual and we're launching
our mobile apps soon!

------
MichaelMoser70
They could have turned it into a payed service, with so many active users.
What would be the arguments against such a move?

------
tmzt
The really interesting product/service would be a datastore and RSS consumer
like GR API is.

I think a lot of competitors spend time working on the UI and miss the power
that is behind it.

(I would include Google in this list, even if they didn't have the front end
UI the Atom API would still be a useful thing.)

I wonder if building something on elasticsearch would work.

------
taimoorq
This one works well on mobile devices and lets you add feeds from around the
web and tag them for retrieval later. It also keeps you focused on one feed at
a time instead of letting you put 100 feeds on one page which makes it hard to
read any one.

<http://newsfeedreader.com>

------
raphman
For those looking for a desktop app, the Opera browser has a nice integrated
RSS reader and is cross-platform.

------
tonyblundell
Lots of people rushing to build RSS clients, but why not build something
better?

If you can build something that will take any URL, figure out which bits are
changing regularly (the news items, etc), and push the changes to a Reader
style interface, you might be on to a winner.

It's 2013, a reader should be possible without RSS.

------
oivvio
I've looking into building a Google Reader alternative for quite some time
now. Because let's face it, Google Reader has been neglected since forever.
This news prompts me to finally do it. Tell me what you think:
<http://getfishwrap.com/>

------
georgeoliver
This definitely is the first time I've been disappointed by a web service
shutting down.

I've been looking through alternatives. I'd like it to look like this,
<http://wp.me/aseR-cr> , be web-based, have keyboard navigation, and not much
else.

Is there a web-based newsbeuter?

------
jobigoud
Could someone underline the advantages of Google Reader and the features that
will be missed ? What had it that other free products don't ?

(I use a desktop reader for news (FeedDemon) and an Android app for podcasts,
I don't really know what I'm missing by not using something like reader.)

------
mschuster91
I am calling for the biggest shitstorm in the existence of the Internet.
Anonymous, where are you? :D

------
sbirchall
I've got to mention the FF add-on "InfoRSS" which I haven't used in a while,
but I just exported my feeds to it rather painlessly and it offers some nice
features if you're willing to put a bit of time into customizing what you want
from it. Deals with podcasts as well.

------
avaku
At readrz.com, we will be releasing a related tool in a few weeks. It is not a
pure RSS reader, but it's useful for aggregating information. See more details
and subscribe for updates at <http://eepurl.com/d48hj>

------
zmanian
I was hoping for a different fate for Google Reader.

\- The feed digesting functionality could have been merged into Google+

-Google Reader could have become a news reader skin on the of G+

As long as Google Reader remained a stand alone service and yet deeply tied
into the search index, it has been doomed.

------
abrowne
I was kind of always expecting this ... I'm always afraid the same thing will
happen to Voice.

~~~
jbigelow76
I don't know, Voice can act as a competitor to Microsoft's Skype. With no
visible competing product from Microsoft, Apple or Facebook and no perceived
competition from something like Newsblur Google thinks they can kick their
Reader users in the junk with impunity.

------
mindstab
Author Warren Ellis on twitter: "Google shuts down Google Reader, probably the
most effective tool I have."

<https://twitter.com/warrenellis/status/311992329181478912>

------
endgame
I never used google reader, but I wrote my own tool to merge the feeds I care
about into one megafeed: <https://code.google.com/p/msrss/>

That way, I don't have to depend on any web services.

------
jason_slack
For OS X users that use Apple Mail it supports RSS Feeds.

Not sure about Outlook 2012 for Mac though...

~~~
mikestew
Sadly, that went away in Mountain Lion.

~~~
jason_slack
oh, geez. I am on 10.8 but I dont use Apple Mail and I was going to go back to
it solely for OS X.

------
flatfilefan
Search, maps, reader what other Google services do geeks use daily? Strange
decision!

------
mkr-hn
When choosing your new reader, look for the one that's already monetized.
Feedly has ads and plans for premium. NewsBlur has a paid option. Any hosted
option without financial incentive lives at the whim of the developer.

------
raywu
Would you pay for Google Reader per month?
[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xr6ZINsFK69VCPW2ryuTfHGrt1R...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xr6ZINsFK69VCPW2ryuTfHGrt1RyE-1D51FEAdt0VJs/viewform)

~~~
fakeer
Yes. But without ads and with my privacy intact, totally.

------
7hundredand77
I have been working on one for the last couple of weeks, and will hopefully
create it as a fully functional RSS reader:

<http://nuesbyte.com/>

for more information, visit me on reddit username: 7hundredand77

------
srinibond
One update for all RSS feed fans. If you are in India, US or Casnada, you
could SMS enable your feeds by using the RSS feature of <http://txtweb.com>.
check it out!

------
samspot
Between the massive interest in this topic and the fact that many google
reader competitors were crushed by load last night, I'm having a hard time
believing use has 'declined' as much as Google is implying.

------
neves
At least now I'll have to search for another reader. I've always were worried
that Google knows too much about me. They can access my email, see what I
search and download, and every news/blog that I follow.

------
Spooky23
The writing was on the wall for reader once they stripped the
commenting/sharing functionality. This was a great tool for the teams I
managed to stay on top of things. The redesign destroyed the product.

------
shmerl
Time to stick to Akregator.

~~~
zanny
I've been reading up about Akregator, and it seems to be direly under-staffed
in terms of developer oomph. There was blag post a few years ago about porting
it to Akondai: <http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=137> but it is
still using Metakit.

Maybe this is the wake up call to get Akregator back up to snuff, though. I
might look at the code to see if theres anything I can do, at least.

------
ruok0101
Good motivation for cleaning out all those feeds I never read anymore...

------
bromagosa
I use it daily. A lot. Since they're shutting it down, couldn't they release
the code as opensource so we can build our own greader servers? Or is that
insane from the technical point of view?

------
buremba
I reacted in a same way when Google Notebook shutted down. WTF GOOGLE?!

------
friendofasquid
We convert a few big-ish blogs to audio using a professional reader if you're
into audiobooks or podcasts. Skip Google Reader listen instead.

<http://castify.co/>

------
senegoid
what is concerning is that this decision could influence sites making their
feeds available.

Twitter and G+ are not viable alternatives.

Google alerts to RSS were wonderful. I'm sure they will shutter alerts soon
too.

------
bbayer
They could offer paid version. I guess lots of people will want to throw a few
bucks for that kind of product. For me Google Reader is one of the few
software that I use every day.

------
r4ps
I bought SimpleRSS.com a little while ago with the intention of building an
alternative and open-source RSS reader. If anyone's interested in acquiring
the domain, message me! ;)

------
josh-j
Netvibes is another alternative (it has a widget and reader view).

~~~
salmanapk
Thanks! Was trying to remember this one.

------
mimor
For the people running their own OwnCloud setup:
<https://github.com/owncloud/apps/tree/master/news>

------
jjsz
See. The thing is. I haven't found ONE solution that imports starred items,
unread items, and feeds properly besides Reeder. And it doesn't work on
Android or on the web. :(.

------
deconq
I support this move.

For me, RSS is a necessary evil. I always opt for email subscription when I
have the choice, because I find it infinitely more convenient to have my
subscriptions and emails in the one place, rather than in two separate
products.

However, for sites that do not offer email subscription but only offer RSS
_cough_ HN _cough_ \- I reluctantly use Google Reader to subscribe. Meaning an
extra account to check each day.

Hopefully this won't merely result in everyone switching to just another RSS
aggregator - instead, I hope it will prompt websites to start using more
convenient subscription methods, whether that be email or something else.

RSS is dead. Long live... ???

------
jayadevan
Alternatives: [http://www.nextbigwhat.com/alternatives-to-google-
reader-297...](http://www.nextbigwhat.com/alternatives-to-google-reader-297/)

------
jpswade
I used to have a news (rss feed) reader on my blackberry, which was great.

Now I switched to Android, I've been using Google Reader so I can sync it
online too.

So now this sucks, what's the alternative?

------
binderbizingdos
\- apt-get install rss2email \- add some feeds \- be done with it

~~~
autotravis
I tried this a while back and totally forgot about it. Thanks for the
reminder!

To run it, use the r2e command and you can follow the guide
here:[http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-
with-r...](http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-with-
rss2email/#unix)

I think I will try this and set up some filters to move the feed emails out of
my inbox for later viewing.

------
mikro2nd
Next will be Blogger...

------
justips
I'm going to try <https://ifttt.com>. It has a few recipes for RSS: RSS ->
Instapaper, Readability, email and so on.

------
vonuebelgarten
I just saw half my twitter timeline panicking about this. Is there so much
people using it? What happened to desktop feed readers?

Newsbeuter is serving me well, as usual, for years.

~~~
LoganCale
Google Reader is the back-end/syncing platform for many desktop and mobile
feed readers, so everyone who uses those apps suffers from this as well. It's
especially useful for feeds that update frequently, because if you go offline
for a period of time you end up missing out on content, especially if their
feed only has the 15 most recent items. Google Reader is constantly
downloading and storing those items, even when you're offline, and syncs them
with your client when you reconnect. (Plus if you read RSS on both desktop and
mobile, it keeps your read items in sync.)

~~~
vonuebelgarten
Well, that's a feature of Google Reader I didn't know. Blame, since I never
bothered to test it.

------
leephillips
A very nice thing about Google Reader is that is real time, because it
receives pubsubhubbub pushes. Are any of the alternatives mentioned here
capable of that?

~~~
18pfsmt
Looking through the git repo, it appears NewsBlur does.

------
csom
I wonder what would happen if everybody who wants Google to continue Reader
would start clicking on the Ads in Reader on a daily basis. Oh wait, which
ads...

------
calgaryeng
Are there any open source alternatives (I'm thinking Ruby/Rails/Sinatra) where
I could throw up my own RSS read/sync server onto Heroku or something?

~~~
draegtun
Have a look to see if there are any _Planet_ type solutions for Ruby -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>

I'm going to spend some time looking at the two main Perl solutions, Perlanet
& Plagger (used respectively by <http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org> &
<http://perlsphere.net>).

* Perlanet - <https://metacpan.org/module/perlanet>

* Plagger - <https://metacpan.org/module/Plagger>

Failing that I may produce a custom solution with a feed aggregator library
(for eg. <https://metacpan.org/module/XML::Feed::Aggregator>).

------
kevinSuttle
I have never gotten the appeal of Google Reader. I've been using Netvibes for
several years and have yet to find anything better. You'll be glad you did.

netvibes.com

------
goronbjorn
With the rise of things like Twitter and Facebook as primary news/link
sources, I doubt that most people 18 and under _even know what RSS is_.

------
meerita
Correct me but the rest of the apps and website application who are RSS
readers too use mostly, Google Reader. So this affects also them in a way.

------
Nux
This is a good opportunity for all you smart developers around here to come up
with an open source self-hosted thing to replace gugl reader.

------
spatten
I'm assuming that this will also shut down the Google Reader API, but I
haven't seen anything definite. Anyone have confirmation either way?

------
pit
Hooray! _One time_ I read the Fleshbot RSS feed, and I've never been able to
un-read it -- it just stays in my "Read items" queue.

------
winkerVSbecks
The loss of Reader doesn't matter much to me a most others. It's the fact that
Reader synced all my RSS feeds to whichever application that was/is the
flavour of the month. It's that ability to have a repository of your feeds
available in an instance. That's the product people need. Google should try to
build that functionality into Gmail or something.

Also, fuck any RSS feed reading service that charges monthly. I'll pay for an
app, but I'm not paying a monthly subscription fee to read freely available
content.

------
ja27
I'm going to move all my feeds over to FriendFeed.

------
marban
Thank you, Google+

------
hnasarat
Liferea is a great RSS app. It's Free software too. <http://lzone.de/liferea/>

------
usablebytes
Although, it is sad for the current Reader users, good thing about Google is,
it admits its failures quickly and get over it.

------
ireadzalot
One of the first 2 sites I go to when I launch my browser in the morning
everyday (gmail and reader). I will sorely miss it.

------
Morst
I believe the "loyal userbase" would be large enough to sustain a startup. But
sadly that is not enough for google anymore.

~~~
campuscodi
Sergey Brin is a scurge for old Google fans.... this guy seems to focus on
hardware related products more than what Google great.... its Web products

------
kirian
Well that sucks. One of my most used/visited apps/sites. Maybe Yahoo should
build a reader. Could be a good fit for them.

------
MichaelMoser70
actually it is still available until June 1st. sad it will be gone. I think
gmail will be next to go - I think the last gmail redesign made the product
less usable on purpose; they must be paying a lot for storage cost on
abandoned accounts, old emails etc; nowadays they get more transient user info
from other sources ...

------
egeozcan
well, their "cleaning"s now deserve their own blog; just google this:
site:"googleblog.blogspot.com" intitle:cleaning

------
_Mark
I am afraid of what I am going to do with all this spare time I will regain
once this is gone.

This was the home page of "My" internet.

~~~
_Mark
From your 626 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 12,220 items

Since September 5, 2010 you have read a total of 300,000+ items

------
bconway
I heartily recommend <http://theoldreader.com/> \- lean and mean.

------
slake
Wow. That's a lot of angst. I feel it too. Years of saving useful links on
reader which was really easy to search.

------
mrgreenfur
They shut down the products API, in case anyone was using it. It was a quick
way to get pricing info into apps..

------
prathibhanu
Checkout <http://multiplx.com> as an alternate to Google Reader.

------
mike_ivanov
Screw you, Google. Now I need to spend my own time to write a replacement as
there is no viable alternative.

------
VictorZ
<http://ifgooglekillsreader.tumblr.com/>

------
taproot
Google: Reader usage is going down, lets axe it.

Every alternative reader website / service: Fuck me thats a lot of traffic.

------
camillomiller
Do you this will have a big impact on sites like daring fireball that have a
huge rss subscription base?

------
SaveReader
Save Google Reader : <http://www.savereader.info>

------
cgcdesign
Sad to see it go. At least I have 3 months to make my own, should make for a
good weekend(s) project.

------
shared4you
Anybody knows good alternatives?

------
ambirex
Seeing the boom in alternatives, someone should start making a feedburner
competitor.

~~~
bennesvig
I think Feedblitz is one of the most popular at the moment. I'll either be
switching to that or MailChimp.

------
nazgulnarsil
Which reader can parse the xml file google reader generates without extra
work?

------
killy
<http://lenta.yandex.com>

------
adad95
To me Reader is the 2nd most used google Service. A Great Lost to me.

------
ryfm
sign the petition

[http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Ask_Google_to_keep_Google_R...](http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Ask_Google_to_keep_Google_Reader_online)

~~~
voochuk
How about another petition to atleast open source the code so maybe the
community can host it on google apps/ec3 or users can run a private instance

~~~
mieses
The problem is the historical data of all the feeds they've archived, not the
interface. Google, a large number of almost-evil moves eventually adds up to
evil.

------
forgotAgain
Sounds like an opportunity for Yahoo to raise its profile.

------
s1n4
Dammit, I should be looking for an alternative rss reader

------
ohheyworld
holy cow....can't believe this is going away. I love reader.

real reason they are shutting it down...they want all that sharing/interaction
in Google+...which i hate.

------
mhausenblas
Not cool, GOOG. Suppose I'll give NewsBlur a try then.

------
prathibhanu
Guys, try this goo.gl/r861h Visually rich RSS reader

------
n2j3
let me be the first to say <http://nooooooooooooooo.com/>

------
stuqqq
that is so sad.

------
asdf333
its too bad. i can see why they cancelled it but it was an essential part of
how i process information

------
damian2000
I'll be honest, I never even tried Google Reader. An RSS reader is such a
simple app, I didn't think that it would anything special.

------
rob22
Its very bad day for rss lover....

------
mooreds
Will blogger stop supporting RSS?

------
rafski
RSS bypasses ads on websites. Google makes money on those ads. It was strange
that they supported RSS for so long.

------
ika
the world is near the end

------
olgeni
As soon as RSS disappeared from Mountain Lion, Google copied the idea: time to
sue again.

------
kondro
If they want to make money from it, charge for it.

I would gladly pay $40/month to access Google Reader.

------
aquadrop
Don't Be Evil... Heh.

------
knodi
WTF is this bullshit... I love Google Reader.

------
edwardunknown
I'm a big dummy but almost every major decision Google has made since Larry
Page became CEO has me baffled. The whole idea of squandering the nice vibes
they had by forcing everybody into that stupid Facebook knockoff, killing off
cool projects left and right, those dumb glasses that nobody is going to
buy... I don't get it.

Is Reader costing them that much money? Put some ads on it then. Is this a
Captain Ahab thing where Facebook is the whale? Then someone should let them
know that no one really likes their Facebook ripoff because _no one likes the
actual Facebook._ Facebook is a fucking car crash. I wish Google would just
make cool stuff and continue not being evil and knock it off with the master
plan bullshit.

~~~
gwern
Supposedly Page has been heavily inspired by Steve Jobs's advice to him to
'focus'.

Just consider this part of Jobs's most poisonous legacy: his epigones.

------
andyl
Curse this decision - I use Google Reader every day.

What is the best alternative RSS reader ??

~~~
viraptor
Just imported my feeds into <http://theoldreader.com> and it seems to work ok.
Just keep in mind that importing takes a while - I saw only the first entry
for a minute or two, then others started joining in.

~~~
taproot
This is looking like the best straight up switch out for reader. Imports are
currently limited, and adding a sub takes a while. I'm sure it will settle
down in a couple of days.

Message when clicking "import": Hey! Because of the huge load we started
seeing from lots of concurrent feed import operations, we had to limit the
number of imports active at any given time. It looks like right now there are
no available slots left, so you might want to visit this page some time later.
Meanwhile, feel free to subscribe to feeds manually. Please accept our
apologies for this inconvenience.

------
DannoHung
Why don't they just fucking ask me to pay for it? God damnit.

------
fakeer
There were apps and services. They starting shutting down. Never actually
mattered. Not to me at least. Until a few were killed, like Google Reader, and
I started understanding the frustration and sometimes disappointment shown by
some of the users and fans. I feel the same now. This is one of the few
services other than Gmail that I use(used) from Google's shop. Will have to
settle for a good alternative now.

I guess I would rather to go a paid solution. It's for the same reason that I
am thinking of this move that I went to Pinboard from Delicious for -
advertisements were not my worry, it was the chance being shut down.

Was Google Reader bringing any revenue to Google? I mean I never saw any ads
in there, so I doubt it but some of you might be knowing better.

Not sure they have killed for just being out there not bringing any money home
or _they will be focussing on Google Currents_ now?

But stuff like this [http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-
feeddemon.ht...](http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-
feeddemon.html) is more sad than the news itself :(

------
fakeer
If one think devs must learn from this development, that would be - go for an
open standard now. The way Rackspace is doing with OpenStack for cloud.
Similarly sth for feed sync/tag etc - where a services changes with an URL and
few more things like an UUID etc. Devs in this field might be having a better
picture of this.

I just want sth like email. Like currently I host my mails with Google Apps
with my domain but I can take it to my VPS any minute and my email will still
be up and will keep syncing to my desktop/mobile clients without a problem. Or
maybe I would shift to some free provider like ABC, XYZ etc.

------
smegel
What happened to you Google :(

------
helloamar
I use reeder for Mac and ipad that is connected to my google reader account.
Need to find an alternative now.

~~~
cstross
Not necessarily; @reederapp tweeted a few hours ago, "Don't worry, Reeder
won't die with Google Reader."

He's not very communicative but I suspect this means he's working on something
:)

------
camus
Google might drop anything now, groups , appengine, whatever , You just cant
trust their Saas anymore.

------
nilved
Reader was the only thing that made me almost want a Google account. A real
shame to see it shut down -- I don't think any competitors are as good.

------
magoon
Wait, Google is a business?

