
Google Reader Alternatives - fraqed
http://lifehacker.com/5990881/five-best-google-reader-alternatives
======
patrickmay
What I find most appealing about Google Reader is the simplicity of the
interface. I just want to see a list of the sites I'm following, an indicator
when new content is available, a summary of the content, and the ability to
view the full content. That's it. Nothing flashy, nothing social, just the
Emacs (or even vi) of RSS readers.

Newsblur comes closest for me so far, but I suspect I'll end up rolling my
own.

~~~
jcampbell1
> Newsblur comes closest for me so far

Newsblur is the opposite of what I want. I want consistent typography, and
much less interface, and a google reader API compatible service so I can
continue to use things like Reeder. Newsblur highlights everything but the
text.

I really hope the people behind Reeder build a backend and web frontend before
Google Reader goes away.

~~~
hilko
Same here. I'm ok with NewsBlur because it does what I needed from google
reader: lists of feeds, lists of posts, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate
between both. I actually paid for NewsBlur over Feedly just for the keyboard
feed navigation.

What I miss from the keyboard shortcuts is the n/p and shift-n/p where you
navigate without opening an item.

I'm currently ambivalent about the commenting/social part, but I can see it
work and take off.

As long as the interface does what I want, I can ignore the fact that it's
rather ugly, a bit odd here and there, and doesn't properly show the 'active'
item. But I really think there should be a 'minimal' theme that emulates
google reader's.

And, of course, it's currently a bit show. But I can forgive the guy for that
:).

------
616c
I am disappointed no one talks about hosting their own. Mod me down if you
want, proud user of Tiny Tiny RSS, which comes with a Web UI, a mobile app
(costs money, but still cheap), and a pretty cool API for a simple PHP app.
Some of us learned our lesson, and will not moved to another crappy "service"
that will shut down in a few years. Just like I do not host my blog on
Posterous.

<https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS>

~~~
Semaphor
> Honorable mentions this week go out to TinyTinyRSS, a self-hosted RSS
> reading app that allows you to grab your feeds on any system, as long as you
> have a web host and you're comfortable installing and setting it up. The
> process actually isn't that difficult, and full disclosure, I'm thinking
> about doing this myself. Since there's a Tiny Tiny RSS Android client to go
> with it, it's worth a look. Plus, it's free and open source, and at the end
> of the day you own your feeds and your data, and it won't shut down on you.

That said, I tried it and found it annoying to work with as well as incredibly
slow. I paid for Newsblur and if they ever go down I'll jump into the
relatively complicated installation process on my server.

edit:

And of course there are other options: Fever [1], the hopefully soon finished
News [2] app for ownCloud [3] and Newsblur [4] is open source as well.

[1] <http://www.feedafever.com/>

[2] <http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=479>

[3] <http://owncloud.org/>

[4] <https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur>

~~~
dsr_
I tried it and found it quite reasonable, even running it from my desktop _.
Is it as fast as Google Reader? Not quite, but it's not slow enough to be
annoying, and certainly not "incredibly slow". Much easier to install than
Newsblur.

Disclaimer: I'm a sysadmin, not a developer.

_AMD 2 core 5600+, 8GB, one spinning iron disk with an SSD cache via
flashcache, Debian stable, Postgres and Apache and PHP as Debian provides.
Really nothing fancy.

~~~
Semaphor
For me it was slow enough to be annoying. Though I only installed it local
(Windows) on XAMPP and not on my VPS. But considering that my machine isn't
too weak (i3, 16gb ram, SSD) I expected more. Pretty much every click took 1-2
seconds.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I'm running a 6 year old fork of tt-rss on a machine w/ specs that are too
embarrassing to post and I get reasonable performance. I use a Postgres back-
end and I spent some time tweaking indexes to get it to perform better. I
haven't kept up with the mainline tt-rss distribution-- perhaps it's become
crufted-up. The older releases definitely could work well even on modest
hardware.

------
vamonos
I'm pretty happy with <http://www.feedly.com/> so far. No brainer to import my
feeds from reader, and pretty nice presentation. I'm actually happy now that I
was forced into switching.

My biggest pain point was replacing Google Listen (on android for listening to
my podcasts). Subscribing to a new podcast was as easy as adding a new feed to
reader under the 'Listen Subscriptions' folder.

But I've replaced Listen with Pocket Casts and I'm happy with it so far. For
more info, see [http://www.vamonossoftware.com/2013/03/living-without-
google...](http://www.vamonossoftware.com/2013/03/living-without-google-
reader-and-listen.html)

~~~
adad95
Google Listen is Very Limit Podcast Player. After i Discovery beyondpod, i
never use Lister aging.

<http://www.beyondpod.com/Android/>

Beyondpod sync with Google Reader too. And i will miss this function.

~~~
vamonos
Yeah, Listen was discontinued in 2012 so it wasn't ever going to improve - but
it did the job for me for long enough. Pocket Casts has 2 features I missed in
Listen : variable speed playback and sleep timer.

------
specto
I've started using <http://selfoss.aditu.de/>. It is written in php with a
mysql or sqlite database. It works great and with some tweaks from
vince(<https://github.com/vincebusam/selfoss>) it works even better.

------
tomku
The article makes mentions mobile clients, but could anyone here give a
slightly more mobile-centric review of the alternatives? Since I've gotten a
Nexus 7, I've found myself using the Google Reader Android app rather than the
web app, and I view Android app quality as one of the biggest factors in
selecting a replacement service.

The first alternative I tried was Newsblur. I like their web version, although
it's been unresponsive occasionally due to the influx of users. However, their
official Android app has left me unsatisfied. In about 5 minutes of playing
with it, I got duplicate articles, then a negative unread count, then a crash.
I'm willing to give it more time to iron out the bugs, but in the meantime,
what other alternatives (if any) have really solid Android apps?

~~~
guizzy
The people behind Press, the best Google Reader app on Android, are apparently
working on finding another place to host its content, but they have no webapp
for now. Feedly has a good Android app and webapp, but it's more of a
Flipboard type of interface than a Google Reader interface.

I've gone with Newsblur; hopefully they'll work a bit on the Android app, but
for now it's the one with the best feature set.

~~~
tomku
I tried Feedly after posting that, and I don't like the minimalist styling of
both the web app and the Android app. I could probably get used to it, but I
think I'm happier with Newsblur for the moment. I'll keep an eye on Press's
plans, they seem like they could be a good alternative depending on which way
they choose to go to handle the Reader shutdown. Thanks for the info.

------
jobigoud
Can someone point out the features I've been missing all along by using a
Desktop RSS reader? Is it just synchronization or is there something else to
it?

~~~
__chrismc
It's mostly about the synchronisation. For my use-case, I read articles in
Google Reader during my lunch break at work. When I'm browsing at home later,
on my own PC or iPad I don't want to have to wade through dozens of articles
I've already read to find the new stuff.

I guess there's also the convenience of access to the web app pretty much
anywhere, but that's secondary (to me).

------
jimigoodmojo
I don't care about reader as a reader. I care about it because it manages my
rss subscriptions for several apps I use daily. Podcasts, pulse, ifttt. They
all integrate with reader. Typography,shmypography. pick a client.

This is the reason they are shutting it down. How do you monetize something
when the user never sees your content. I understand that, but it doesn't mean
the internet didn't just get worse.

------
Intermediate
I decided to go with Liferea desktop RSS reader and I like it so far.

------
Toshio
Can anyone point to a full-fledged review of The Old Reader?

I could only find first impressions by googling around for a bit.

~~~
bimozx
I've been using it for a few days, but I can only comment on how they present
the feeds, since I don't use the social features at all. It's pretty decent,
there is no frills and pretty straightforward. If you want an RSS reader with
a simple interface, and doesn't impose anything on you, this should be
suitable for you.

But, there are two huge things that are a turn-off for me. First, I can't set
the default homepage to be where all my subscription feeds' items are
aggregated. So you will be left with the dashboard page when you open The Old
Reader. Second, the feeds' items are not sorted in the order they were created
or posted by default, but what irks me is I can't find any options so that it
will be sorted according to the dates. I don't know if both of these things
are something they will fix or add in the future, so I'm still jumping back
and forth between this and Feedly. If they are not planning to address both of
those caveats in the future, and Feedly delivers their promise on the seamless
migration when Google Reader dies. Then I'll probably opt for Feedly.

~~~
webwanderings
There is an arrow icon for sorting.

~~~
bimozx
I've tried the arrow icon, and I already tried the "Posts Order" option on
settings, but my feeds' items are still not ordered according to the dates. So
unless I'm missing something...

Here is an image to shed some more clarity on what I really meant.
<http://i.imgur.com/1Zb18cc.jpg>

~~~
webwanderings
Well, as I mentioned below, they are extremely slow at the moment and they are
not even fetching all the feeds on time. I gave them HN's feed yesterday and
when I logged in this morning, they were showing me feeds from 10 hours ago.
My local RSS aggregater was providing me real-time updates. So perhaps that's
where the problem is? I am not sure. As far as I am concerned, if they cannot
handle couple of feeds on time, than I don't know how they're going to handle
500 plus feeds that I have.

------
prathibhanu
Its high time to try the new Visually rich RSS reader <http://goo.gl/r861h> .

~~~
jrajav
Visually rich is precisely what I don't want from an RSS reader. Looking at
that feed, my eyes bounce all over the place trying to parse the content I'm
interested in - the headlines. I'd rather have a vertical, textual list that I
can quickly scan. It's boring, but that's the nature of the medium.

This is one of the reasons I've never tried Pulse, but at least that lines the
content up for easier scanning.

