

State of RSS Readers - julien
http://blog.superfeedr.com/state-of-readers/

======
robmcm
I don't really want a reader, I want a service that syncs state accross
readers, and aggregates my feeds into one feed for easy downloads by devices.

Google reader was perfect for that, and it was only on occasion that I used
their web interface. Most of the time I was on my iPad/iPhone/Android (using
Reeder/Byline/Flipboard and the official android client)

~~~
HelloMcFly
You can do that with Yahoo Pipes (<http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/>). Here is an
example with several pipes, and each pipe combines many RSS feeds into one
(<http://pipes.yahoo.com/talentintelligence>). You can even then export the
pipe as an RSS of its own.

~~~
robmcm
That's one part, but it doesn't solve the central state control. Perhaps
someone could extract the Google reader API and turn it into a standard for
other products to implement?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Please, no. I'm using the the Google Reader API, and it is crappy, at best.

One of my biggest kvetches is that while I can rename feeds in the browser,
the API exposes no way to get the name I give the feed, or to set it.

~~~
siromoney
By rename feeds do you mean the title? For example, Craig Mod's feed
(<https://feedreader.co/feeds/http://craigmod.com/rss/>) has a rather ungainly
title ("...considering the future of ...") which would make sense to rename.

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AndrewDucker
The death of Google Reader might actually be a good thing, in the long run.

Google giving away their product for free effectively prevented a working
market - nobody could make money selling a feed-aggregator.

With Google out of the way, there will hopefully be money sloshing around, and
users who now realise how much they want this kind of service (and are
prepared to pay for it).

~~~
sabret00the
But how much were these services really offering? It is one thing to attempt
to charge for a superior service, but for the most basic of services? That's a
whole different story.

IMHO, feed reading should be integrated into the browser as a tab, not in the
hands of commercial interests. But that's an aside.

~~~
tmgrhm
>IMHO, feed reading should be integrated into the browser as a tab, not in the
hands of commercial interests.

This is a really interesting idea. Has there been any talk in Chrome
development about building a browser-side RSS reader? Google would still get
all the information they get from Reader now but they'd be making the
'feature' exclusive to their browser. This coming not long after Apple
_removed_ their feed managing ability in the web browser, meaning they could
get a load of Chrome converts on OS X just from that.

It'd be really interesting to see what happened if browser-side RSS became
"the thing" again. Although, as julien pointed out, doing it browser-side
doesn't necessarily mean your RSS isn't in the hands of a commercial interest.

~~~
greyfade
It was tried, IIRC, early in Firefox's development. It ended up being scrapped
for some reason, and it didn't really work all that well.

Opera has a feed reader, too, but I never really found it to be as usable as
Thunderbird or Akregator (neither of which I really like.)

~~~
zeckalpha
I don't think it was completely scrapped. I know some people who use live
bookmarks.

------
gnosis
I use Newsbeuter[1] in a Linux terminal.

It's not a GUI app or web-based, which are both plusses to me. It's also
neither closed-source, nor spyware (like way too many web-based readers are).

Newsbeuter is relatively feature rich and has a decent enough interface. I'm
pretty happy with it, and prefer it to the closest Linux terminal RSS reader
competitor that I've found, Snownews.[2]

The main problems with it is that when feeds get large (1000+ articles),
reading that feed gets to be pretty slow. This is a long-standing performance
bug that has not been fixed in years. But, apart from that, if you're reading
feeds with a reasonable number of article in them, it's great.

[1] - <http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html>

[2] - <http://snownews.kcore.de/>

~~~
__--__
I used to use Newsbeuter. The deal breaker for me was the inability to hook it
up to a daemon on an external server. I wound up replacing it with rss2email
instead. Now I read both my email and my news in mutt! :)

~~~
abc3
I'm a big fan of rss2email. Personally, I like doing as much as possible in a
single application. Combining email and feeds feels natural to me.

------
liotier
No one mentioned Gregarius yet : <https://sourceforge.net/projects/gregarius/>
: it is a fine self-hosted web-based alternative to Google Reader. There has
been no project activity lately but the software works just fine, I have been
using it since 2006 - just keep it private for security's sake. It scales well
with a lot of feeds.

~~~
julien
Added!

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waxjar
I think the developers of a couple of the biggest RSS readers should get
together and decide on a standard file format to store "metadata" such as read
items, starred items, etc.

This file could be stored on a server or in a user's Dropbox folder. It would
allow users to pick an RSS reader freely (per platform), without losing and
rebuilding all their data. It also keeps all this metadata in sync, one less
worry for the developers.

~~~
jlgaddis
What's in it for them, though? I'm guessing that most of the developers want
you to use _their_ reader and I'm not sure there's an advantage (for them) in
adding code that makes it easier for you to switch to another product.

Don't get me wrong. I totally agree w/ you and wish that switching is easier.
That "cost of switching", though, is the primary reason I'm still using the
reader that I am (and have been for years).

~~~
mindcrime
_What's in it for them, though?_

A rising tide lifts all boats. If something is developed that makes the
_entire ecosystem_ more attractive, then everybody benefits.

 _I'm guessing that most of the developers want you to use their reader and
I'm not sure there's an advantage (for them) in adding code that makes it
easier for you to switch to another product._

Sure there is... because I'm more likely to try your product _in the first
place_ if I know I'm not locked into it. "The best way to capture users is to
make it easy for them to leave" and all that.

------
ismiseted
No mention of Newsbeuter "The Mutt of RSS readers". Feeds and podcasts all
managed in your terminal: <http://www.newsbeuter.org>

~~~
julien
We explictly scoped only web based readers...

------
Fuzzwah
Since I'm one of those "weekend hackers who likes to use PHP like a
newb"......

I use a self hosted and rather hacked up rnews install:
<http://rnews.sourceforge.net/>

It uses magpierss to grab feeds: <http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/>

I also make heavy use of yahoo pipes to munge together a few rss feeds and do
other regex'y type things to a feeds: <http://pipes.yahoo.com> (pls yahoo,
never kill pipes!)

The reason I like rnews is the boxed layout (where each feed is seperated),
rather than every other rss reader which jams everything into a single feed.
With the boxed way I have the feeds I read daily up top and then progressively
have boxes for sites which I only skim headlines for every week down lower.

I have a side question which I've been meaning to float on HN for some time:
is there anything cool I could do with the fact that my self hosted rss
aggregator receives roughly 2,000 hits a day from search bots? I mean I get
scraped constantly all day, from ALL engines.

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brador
Dude forgot <http://skimfeed.com>. Guess it's not 3.0 enough. Recommendation
engine kicks in around 5 clicks, go easy on her.

~~~
julien
Not really a reader since I can't add my own subscriptions... merely and
agregator!

------
thisisabore
There is also no mention of Tiny Tiny RSS or RSS Lounge, which are both good
RSS readers that you can self-host pretty easily (FOSS webapps).

Pretty surprising.

~~~
AndrewDucker
If I wanted to host Tiny Tiny RSS what's a good place to buy some hosting from
to run it?

~~~
voltagex_
* lowendbox.com (be prepared for "fun", you get what you pay for) * my new favourite digitalocean.com

* EC2

No referral links here, but I am on Gittip :P

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js-coder
Sigh, I actually started building a RSS reader for fun five days ago. Now
Google Reader is shutting down, and it seems like everyone is starting to
build one.

~~~
spottr
That's five days head start, get back to work!

------
lambda
Why is it that so many of these alternatives are hosted web apps? Isn't the
lesson to learn from Google Reader going away that you might not want to trust
hosted web apps for the long term? Why aren't there more client-side app
alternatives?

~~~
garyrichardson
Number of times google reader has a planned shut down, in which I still have
plenty of time to grab my data: 1

Number of times something has happened to make an old desktop app stop
working: numerous

for example (I haven't experienced all of these):

\- switching from Windows -> Mac \- having my hard drive fail and finding out
my backups were broken \- OSX upgrades breaking backwards compatibility (ie,
old binary format) \- having my laptop stolen \- switching jobs, requiring me
to give my laptop back \- having multiple devices that I like to read news on
(ie, phone, laptop, tablet)

I much prefer to have as little as possible tied to the hunk of metal my
sweaty fingers type on. I haven't lost any data yet from using 'cloud
services' and the GR replacement I pick will be well vetted.

~~~
gnosis
I value my privacy far more than any feature or convenience a web app may
offer. This is one of the main reasons why I stay away from web apps as much
as possible, and use open-source client-side apps whenever I can. As a side-
benefit, I also don't have to rely on the whims of the web app provider to
keep their service running.

Unless you use web apps for absolutely everything, you're still going to have
to make backups. And if you're making backups anyway, how hard is it to
include a tiny little list of RSS feed URLs which can be used to pick up from
where you left off with any RSS reader, should anything happen?

Anyway, if you screw up your backups, you've got far more serious problems
than simply restoring an RSS feed list. Do a good job on backups, and the rest
mostly falls in to place.

------
joshaidan
I stopped using Google Reader and RSS feeds a long time ago without actually
intending on doing so. I just started finding so much stuff to read through
Facebook, Twitter and Hacker News that I totally forgot about RSS.

That being said, I did make a simple ruby script to email me articles when an
RSS feed gets updated. I did this mainly to help me keep tabs on service
availability RSS feeds, i.e. Twitter's status RSS, Facebook's status RSS,
Amazon AWS stratus RSS, and my local weather advisory RSS. It comes in very
handy. Maybe I'll put the script on GitHub.

------
dysoco
He forgot completly about Desktop RSS readers: Liferea, Thunderbird,
Akregator, LightRead, etc. etc.

~~~
sophacles
A general problem with desktop readers is that they don't really sync with
each other, unless there is also a back-end service associated with them. (or
they support many services).

My news reader is my go-to "I have a few minutes" thing, so I use it equally
from desktop/laptop, phone, iPad and so on. I don't want to spend any effort
clearing each source of articles I've read on another.

~~~
dysoco
I agree, normally I just use my Desktop, but it's nice to have sync across
devices and OS.

With Google Reader you could have that sync between RSS Readers because you
were using Reader as backend, but now?

------
BUGHUNTER
Most clientside newsreaders simply do not scale, several thousand feeds make
them die. Also you want to have your rss catcher always online, so a server is
a better choice - but many FOSS serverside readers are also poorly
implemented, slow, missing features, bad design.

Also the extremely annoying variability of rss feeds is still not handled by
many rss parsers, especially the php world misses on this. python ok with feed
parser.

One more thing: waste of energy duplicating rss feeds a zillion times - just
to be deleted in most cases.

Seems to be a good usecase for a cool pyramid app on a deduplicating
filesystem - what are your plans for the weekend?

------
robotmay
Google Reader shutting down at least gives me a new hobby project to hack on.
There are a few decent alternatives in this list, but nothing I'm particularly
enthusiastic about.

~~~
julien
Please, make sure you tell me (@julien51 or @superfeedr) about it!

~~~
robotmay
I will indeed! Also a helpful reminder for me to try out Superfeedr as part of
the backend :D

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edavis
Does anyone here primarily read their RSS feeds "river of news" style (e.g.,
<http://tabs.mediahackers.org/>) instead of "mailbox" style (with unread
counts)? If so, what do you recommend?

So far I'm thinking of using a river for my "firehose" feeds while using
newsblur (or something) to keep tabs on my "must read" feeds.

I played around with Dave Winer's OPML Editor/River2 but it just never clicked
for me.

------
hymloth
Do you want a personalized RSS reader plus more? NOOWIT
(<http://www.noowit.com>) enters private beta in a few days!

~~~
AndrewDucker
The text wasn't displaying properly (Firefox), and my email address scrolled
off the side of the textbox you asked me to enter it into, with no way for me
to make sure I'd typed the second half correctly...

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mountaineer
It's early, but something we're working on with memamsa[1] is a way to keep up
to date on your favorite topics using different types of sources: RSS/Atom,
Twitter users/lists, and Hacker News. Combining the best of the traditonal
(RSS) and modern sources of links.

[1] - <http://memamsa.com/start/gr>

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nickmain
Are there any RSS aggregators that leverage Dropbox, GDrive/GDocs or Skydrive
for cross-device synchronization ?

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nakedrobot2
it will be hard to beat google reader in terms of multiple platform support. I
dearly love my android google reader app that lets me load items, view them
offline, sync them when i get back online.

i'm really very sad right now.

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zoowar
I have always use the Firefox Addon Sage <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/sage/>

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DanielStraight
Do any alternatives have the "Next" bookmarklet? That's the only way I ever
use Google Reader.

