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.
I have been using Twitter/Flipboard+Instapaper for a while now as a replacement for traditional RSS readers. I do use Tweetbot but most twitter clients do have "Read Later" applications integrated.
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.
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.
I've worked in RoR, but calling me a huge fan would be a stretch. I have a number of substantial issues with it.
Maybe it's just what I've happened to see, but my impression is th I certainly had to do a lot more upgradingat the PHP platform security issues were more frequent and more substantial than RoR has been. I certainly had to do a lot more upgrading. Maybe it's different these days.
But the major difference I've seen up close is that RoR makes it much easier for average programmers to be productive while still coding securely. If I'm going to be running J. Random Hacker's code on a personal server, I'm going to worry less with Rails.
All that said, I'd also be reluctant to install a Rails app. Just less reluctant than PHP.
PHP and MySQL aren't that bad (and support for them is pretty much guaranteed on every web host).
However, the fact that it supports PHP 4.2 and MySQL 3.23 makes me wonder how old the code base is! Makes me think it's using so many obsolete PHP methods, the deprecated MySQL extension, and is all procedural code (which almost always seems to be spaghetti code with PHP).
I don't know what you mean by customize, but the extent of customization only extends to grouping feeds in folders and choosing how and in which order to display them.
I also vouch for Fever. Someone on HN recommended Fever to me when Bloglines initially bit the dust a couple years ago and it meets every need I've wanted from an RSS reader and more. The genius of it's design is that Fever gets more useful the more RSS feeds you subscribe to, which initially seems counter-intuitive, but is brilliant.
Bought it a few years ago... and I wouldn't recommend it. It was created in a pre-iPad/iPhone era and it's not comfortable to use from anywhere else than a PC.
The problem is that reading their website it seems like it does not support multiple users? If I am going to self-host, I'd rather do it in a way that can support my family and friends.
That's true, but you'll have to recommend something as an alternative instead, since there is only a finite amount of RSS services; I say that as an RSS power user.
Quicktime required for the demo video? Seriously? Sorry, I don't have quicktime installed on this computer, and the days of me installing local applications/plugins to watch video online are over.
That's the hard part. Reader integrates nicely with Android's Listen (podcast app), and the reader app, and there's plenty of standalone clients that sync with Google.
That's my most-used Google app. By far. Colossal disappointment.
Nice to know that there's still at least one other Google Listen user in the world. I'm a huge podcast consumer, I like listening to old podcasts which have fallen off the RSS feed, and I still haven't found anything better.
I honestly don't know what I'm going to do now. As far as I'm aware, nobody besides Google has been archiving RSS history for the past few years. It's a massive pain to dig for old podcast episodes any other way, as full feeds are extremely rare.
BeyondPod. Been using that to manage my podcasts for a few years. It can import from Google Reader or maintain its own podcast list. Easy to export out if needed.
I used to use Google Listen, but at some point started using BeyondPod and recently - within the last couple of weeks - went to the paid version of BeyondPod. It works great.
http://netnewswireapp.com is wonderful for the Mac users out there that aren't tied to an HTML solution.
Pretty sure you can sync with your Google Reader account and then delete it from the app, and it'll remember your subscriptions. Just deleted mine and it works fine.
Netnewswire is great but now they should provide a new way to sync feeds and especially read/unread counts, flagged and unflagged items, and favorites instead of relying on GReader.
If someone wants a pitch here: don't go for a reader, go for a simple WebDAV like system to keep feeds in sync cross-app with APIs so simple that every dev would include it in its feed reading app!
http://www.protopage.com has full screen mode with keyboard navigation if you first do Colors/Settings then untick "open news items directly" (Unticking this will mean headlines will open in the internal full text RSS news feed reader instead of navigating to the headline's web page directly).
Based on your must-have list, a good low-tech solution might be an RSS to email gateway.
Then your mail client becomes your RSS client. Gmail has j/k key bindings, is relatively unadorned, and facilitates your skim / skip workflow. Excerpts might require some work, but perhaps you could coerce them into the subject line.
"Low-tech"? Email is the best way to read RSS! Email has all the features of high-end RSS headers:
* Remember your read messages, even across clients
* Star and read for later
* Cross-platform
* Configurable archiving
* Keyword filtering
* Search past articles
* Organize feeds into folders using configurable rules
* Social! (Use the "forward" button.)
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/
theoldreader seems to have died on my feed import to the best I can tell, anyone seen anything similar? It says it is still working in the background, but no update past the first 3 it imported...
I hate that too. When I get some free time, I'll create a new gmail account, import my Reader feeds to that, and sign in to theoldreader using the new gmail account. I suppose this will solve the problem, but it would be best if the good people at theoldreader fix it themselves.
That's where I stopped and shall not try it ever if they don't remove and no, I am not going to create a new a/c for that. I mean it's totally for spamming purposes - either to me or my contacts.
By the way, interface looks cleaner, I wish so were the intentions :-)
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".
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.
At least in Google Reader one can email articles, and it auto-suggests email addresses of your contacts. So Google Reader already has access to your Google Contacts.
So I added a feed to theoldreader, and it shows as last updated: 14 hours ago, even though there's been posts since then. Google Reader has already picked them up. The Old Reader sure lives up to its name of delivering me old news...
Other alternatives I tried are also disappointing. July 1 will be a terrible day for the Internet.
"Thank you for uploading your OPML file. We will soon start importing your subscriptions, which might take up to several hours depending on the amount of feeds you have.
There are 22325 users in the import queue ahead of you."
It may take some time indeed... I have 114 subscriptions and some of them can be dead now, as I haven't used GR for quite some time.
I've been using this on and off for the past few months. Frankly, I prefer Google Reader to Fever, but I strongly prefer Fever to any of the other feed readers I've tried. I especially like that I can count on the server staying up and the service not shutting down.
I really like Fever. It imports and exports OPML, so it was easy move from NetNewsWire to Fever and back to other feed apps and backups. The Fever's mobile view works very nicely. Easy to install and it automatically updates itself.
I know Shaun has a great reputation, and I've played his games, but this is exactly how I feel. Wish I could play with it a little bit before I press that "Buy" button.
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.
Been running Fever exclusively for last 3 months when I heard whispers of Google Reader heading for the chopping block. I don't "get" the 'kindle/sparks/etc' lingo it uses, but as a basic Reader replacement AND self-hosted option, i love it. It has keyboard shortcuts and nearly all the other features you'd want.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Just click on the "+" button to add a new feed. In the dialog there is a button "Import from Google Reader or upload OPML".
A small warning: the OPML import will delete you current sites and replace them with the ones from OPML, they will not be merged with the current ones you have.
I've been trying to remember what NewsBlur was called for the past 25 minutes. Thanks for posting this!
That said, I lament the lack of a desktop app. I've been using Reeder for OS X, and I'd really like to have some sort of desktop app instead of relying on my iPhone or a website. Have you considered talking to existing app makers (e.g. Reeder) to see if they might want to switch over to using your service as their backend?
I've been happy with FeedDemon Lite on the Windows desktop for ages. Sad to see I'm losing my sync with Google Reader, but at it'll still serve it's purpose.
NetNewsWire on OS X is nice, but I really need a) syncing between 3 different computers, and b) an iPhone client (and ideally an iPad client too, but not strictly required). Reeder + Google Reader has satisfied this until now.
I used to use GR every day, then on a whim I switched the free newsblur version. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't offer me a lot more than GR did, but after hitting the 60 feed limit a couple of times I've now gone paid and I'm happy to support a service that does exactly what I want it to do. It would have been nice if it imported by saved(or linked or started or whatever they were called in the end) stories from GR though.
One peeve though, I have no idea how to manage my feeds. Is there any easy way to move them round through drag-and-drop? It appears I have to move them manually one by one, but I have a lot of feeds and I'd rather not do that!
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.
The way I see it you have until their next spring cleaning to figure out what they'll axe and make/market it. A couple of months is neither here nor there.
I mean-- err, yes, totally too late! Don't worry about it.
We've been working on something at Skim.Me (http://skim.me) for almost two years now as a replacement for Reader and/or iGoogle. We're still figuring it out but would love anyone looking for a replacement to signup for the next release.
Check out Frontpage, its an RSS reader that lets you browse all your feeds right from your lock screen. No inputting passwords or fumbling through multiple apps.
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.
I think that the base of Google Code Search users that would be willing to pay for a replacement is probably dwarfed by the amount of users willing to pay for a Google Reader replacement.
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.
Verbatim doesn't even fully disable word corrections. There is no way at all to search for punctuation characters. Try it yourself, type in ((((())))) or something and look at all zero results.
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.
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:
Again, doesn't necessarily detract from your issue, but just giving search terms isn't reproducible!
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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.).
I developed http://imnosy.com to notify you when bookmarks/pages you add are updated. Google Reader used to provide this kind of functionality, so I thought I would mention it here myself.
Hmm. I personally have needed to use Google Code Search several times since it shut down, but have never found your site. When I've looked for alternatives by searching Google (say, for "code search"), I've found Koders (now Ohloh code search), but not yours. It seems like you might need to do a bit more SEO.
Yes I certainly do. I have been working on it, but Koders and Ohloh are pretty established so its a long climb. I think the .de domain might be hurting a little bit too. Happy to listen to any actionable items that can address this though.
I didn't know that had any bearing on it but thinking about it seems like it would be a ranking factor. I'll fix that up soon and see if anything changes. Cheers.
1. Blog 2/3 times per week minimum. Target a single, relevant keyword per blog post (relevant to your domain). The post title, H1s, H2s etc, image tags should all contain your primary keyword. Blog posts don't have to be long, but they do have to be useful.
2. Build a G+, FB, Twitter account for your site if you haven't already. Blast out your new posts to these accounts using Hootsuite (free, but you can pay if you like).
3. Build an audience on the social networks - just search around, follow relevant people and share useful, educational material. Don't spam.
4. Personalised mass email from Google Docs and Gmail (kind of hesitant to recommend this in light of Google shuttering services!): http://www.labnol.org/internet/personalized-mail-merge-in-gm... you need to have "newsletter" signs ups (blast out a digest of your blog posts once per month), calls to actions etc on your site for this to work properly (i.e. optimise your site to capture names & emails). Great, low cost/free way to make sure your audience stays engaged and coming back to your site. You can pay for this kind of service too, e.g. Mailchimp (they've a free tier), Constant Contact, or the likes of Hubspot for full suite of marketing automation tools.
Being successful at SEO is almost the same as starting your own company. Any one of these is a full-time proposition.
I would seek out professional SEO company's and try to find the best deal. No way anybody could do all this stuff by themselves. In the end, it will be a worthwhile investment. From my own experience it's very time consuming to get it right.
@patrickk I've been looking for a basics post about SEo without tech speak for ahem years. That doc is brilliant. Thank you! I might be able to start implementing now instead of having SEO on my to-do list yet again.
Definitely interesting the trend that Google is following, first with iGoogle and now Reader.
With backstitch (http://backstit.ch) we get questioned a lot why Google is no longer supporting these types of services (and if this means there is no opportunity there since they aren't worried about it anymore). We honestly feel like there is a lot of surface left uncovered when it comes to personalized/streamlined content and it just doesn't seem to be part of Google's refocusing (this has been seen with the shutting down of a lot of their lab projects as well).
Tried it out, not really feeling it. Not loading Instapaper and Google Reader articles. I can't find the option to delete my account, which is pretty annoying. How do I delete my account again? Thanks.
Sorry to hear about that. If you get a chance please shoot an email to team@backstit.ch and we can take a look at fixing the issues you are experiencing or help you with your account further.
Similarly, who are customers that are neglected by the big players?
In my industry merchant accounts are very difficult to come by. We are considered high risk. Even with a year of processing records showing 1 chargeback out of >3k transactions I can't get access to a merchant with decent rates(currently paying 3.7%). All the big players turn us away. There's gold to be mined off the beaten path.
What is your Android widget like? The large Android widget ( i think it's 3x3?) is the only way I use Google Reader now, and I use it a lot. I hate that this is happening. Does your widget look like Reader's?
I started using NewsBlur about two months ago on a whim after using Google Reader for many years, and I really dig it.
It was super simple to import my feeds from Google and I find that the navigation in NewsBlur lets me read/scroll through items (and ignore articles that aren't interesting) much faster than Google Reader.
Anyone looking for a Google Reader substitute, definitely give NewsBlur a try!
Thanks for your work. I signed up in December, thinking I'd check it out, and ended up liking it so much that I made the switch from Reader the same day (premium too).
I think that's a testament to how functional your app is. The iPhone app, while not up with Reeder (the iPhone app), is still very solid.
I look forward to the redesign too. The beta site looks great!
We've also been working on a Google Reader replacement for the last two years: http://intigi.com. With Intigi, you can import your RSS feeds from Reader (via OPML) and then filter the feeds by your preferred keywords and social signals (e.g., shares via Twitter).
Intigi is a paid service, primarily targeted at marketers, but we do have a number of startups and founders using the product for content discovery and sharing. You can quickly share content you find to social media, a WordPress site, or to an RSS feed (e.g., to connect with IFTTT).
I'm one of the cofounders and happy to answer any questions about the service and would love any feedback, if you decide to give it a test spin. Please email me at mjfern(at)intigi.com.
On the podcasting side, I began http://player.fm to manage podcasts in the cloud. Since then, Google has dropped support for its official Android app, Listen, and now Reader, which many people used for podcasts.
It works from the browser, including mobile browsers, and native apps are coming. There's also an OPML importer, though currently experimental, and subscriptions can be consumed as OPML, RSS, etc.
Wow, didn't consider this until your post. Losing Listen would be a big hit.
Can anyone confirm that the Android Listen app will cease to function (i.e. refresh your existing feeds) once Google Reader is shut down? Am pretty sure that it relies solely on Google Reader's "Listen Subscriptions" tag for refreshing your podcast feeds, so that's definitely another gap that needs filling.
It still continues to work and be used though, so GP's question is relevant. I think it can still work without it, but I'd be surprised if it's superior to all of the other free alternatives in the absence of Reader.
I think it will. Google Reader was key to Listen. I've been using BeyondPod since Google stopped supporting Listen. It works with Google Reader just like Listen did. It's disappointing that such a key feature will be lost. Does anyone know any Podcast apps for Android that supporting syncing feeds like Listen/BeyondPod did with Google Reader?
Out of curiosity: have you also seen a decline in users? I'm interested to know whether Google has seen a decline due to a general loss of interest in feed readers, or whether they are losing users to competitors, such as yours.
I highly doubt that the performance bottleneck has anything to do with serving cacheable static files. When a user asks you which of their feeds have been updated in the last 60 seconds, that's not the kind of request you can just offload to a CDN.
The documentation and marketing on cloudflare.com is a bit misleading on this. Unless you do something unusual and potentially fragile with their page rules, it does not cache HTML: https://support.cloudflare.com/entries/22094188--Does-CloudF... It will hit your server for every page request.
(In fact it only caches certain static files as determined by their file extension. It does not seem to pay much attention to Content-Type of Cache headers. Ugh.)
NewsBlur is pretty good. I've used it for a while. I also write my own feed reader: Rssminer. It's not as full-fledged as NewsBlur, but is a much lighter alternative. It's support login with google and import google reader's subscription list.
It's fast and lightweight and uncluttered, which is great, but it lacks at least one bit of extremely critical functionality:
I need, 100%, to see my content in forward-chronological order (most-recent-last).
I've already given $24 for a year of NewsBlur, and I am super excited about being able to share and comment again. But, I know I'm not alone in wanting correct sorting.
Just 1-2 things I miss:
- how can I mark an article read/unread?
- could I delete an entire folder?
- is there a limit on the number of feeds it can handle (I tried to import from reader, and I miss some feeds/folders)
Looks like it's not able to handle the load. Will check in some time.
Nice app btw. The only good thing from GR closure might be that the dev community comes up with some real great alternatives. And yes, I hope paid ones.
Where shall I keep my feeds there? I mean my list of blogs that I want to follow. Their feed I mean. There is thousands of sources where I can explore, be social(though I hate the term) and read stories which learns from my choices (like Prismatic which certainly doesn't learn - just shows stories filtered using keywords).
Usability tip: I would not have the Hi there box in the main panel. Maybe have it as a popup? Keep the main area clear.
Else, the first thing people try to do is find a way to close/remove/delete it so they can get started, which leads to the down arrow on it, which doesn't work to delete it. And now they're stuck wondering how to delete it...then they close the window without even tasting something they may have enjoyed.
Google can do (1) because they crawl the entire web constantly. That's not going to be a trivial feature to add for anyone else. (2) is also probably a side effect of crawling pretty much everything before you ask for it.
Feedly does a decent job of picking up on which feed I mean when I put a site name in. I don't know how well that will work once they transition to their own API.
Maybe you should just realize that you should pay for the shit you use. Or if you don't value your own time, grab the source and run it yourself (and pay at least $1/month for hosting it, but probably really $10-$20/month for hosting it yourself).
I am trying to register to NewsBlur but I encounter an error every single time after submitting the registration form. You should have a look at it as this is the perfect time to grab new users.
It was 64 before this news. The site regained some functionality when it went down to 12. I chose to go to Feedly instead, which was prepared for this news and works perfectly.
Very cool, but where is the content in the demo coming from? The first thing I clicked on was some anti-Pope Francis screed. If it's a crowdsourced demo that's one thing, but probably not the friendliest thing to hand-pick.
Well, I'm now a paid-up Newsblur subscriber ... couldn't find an easy way of giving feedback on the site so thought I'd use HN.
The layout feels visually ... cluttered? ... but the functionality is excellent so I'm happy. Also the Google Reader import failed the first time, but succeeded the second.
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.
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.
Google already killed reader in their hearths when they made the g+ update. Instead of neglecting it for years to come they did the right thing and let it go for good.
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.
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.
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?
Sample size of one, but Google Reader accounted for 6,168 of my 7,698 RSS subscribers yesterday (according to the probably-also-on-the-chopping-block FeedBurner).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The real pain comes when your email address is no longer valid. You have to hunt down everyone you've ever communicated with to give them a new one. A lot of older, and more casual, contacts will be unable to reach you.
Any geek who relies on a domain name that belongs to someone else for their give-out-to-people, permanent email address needs to have his or her membership card revoked. Even if it's a domain that's owned by Google. Get a domain name.
I have a really common name - it was taken in all permutations of domains for years. So I jumped on it when the .eu domain names came out, and I've happily used that for a long time now. See what you can find in a more "obscure" TLD.
I was talking about the 99.999% of the human race that doesn't frequent HN. If they buy a domain name with email when Google announces that GMail is sunsetting, it's already too late. Old/casual acquaintances, friends of friends, etc. will only have their gmail.com address.
In a way that might be good. They would get in touch with all of those friends and relatives via 'analog' media like phone, a visit or a get-together :-)
Jokes aside, that would be horrible. I've a domain with GApps but I think my chat is still stuck there. Any ideas how can I break free and still able to chat with my friends(Gmail, Fb and some Yahoo) and have chat transcripts somewhere. Anyone?
I use offlineimap on one machine to sync my Google accounts via IMAP (one "master" directory with one directory under that for each account). I then tar up that "master" directory, bzip2 it, and move it to another folder for safekeeping.
My Mac app, CloudPull, will do exactly that. It will also back up Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, and Google Drive. http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/cloudpull/
I have been thinking about this for sometime now and think there is a startup idea there. If someone can promise to give you a email address on their domain, but with the caveat that it will never be revoked come what may, I think lot of people will be willing to use the mail. Bonus, if company promises to hand over the data/email address to your descendants after your death.
I wasn't much of a Google Reader user, but it certainly does feel like this retirement might undermine some of their "trust the cloud" efforts. In the old days products getting killed only meant that no more updates are coming.
You can't just let products sit around and fester. Even if you're not building new features, you have to support browser updates and patch security holes, and the latter in particular means you have to keep around folks familiar with the details of the entire stack. As services age and folks move on to new jobs, that gets increasingly expensive to maintain as you have to train new maintainers.
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.
I think at that point, content creators being aggregated by Google--who are already have a fairly stressful relationship with Google--might accumulate too much ammunition to use against them (as then Google would be directly profiting from aggregating and redistributing content from third-parties in a modified presentation).
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.
Indeed. I regularly use it via the Press app on Android, and visit the actual site only to manage the subscriptions.
The service itself at that level is comparatively straightforward. Hopefully someone (twentyfivesquares?) will step up and offer a replacement. I'd be willing to pay.
I have plenty of feeds that include ads. Reader shows all images and links that are part of the feed body so not going to the site should not be a problem.
If an ad supported feed provider fails to add ads to their feed they just do not understand the medium. One of the core ideas in RSS is to avoid visiting all the subscribed sites!
They could compete with a solid mobile app / desktop app and monetize that. Lots of ways to leverage it against Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. All those services are building freaking news aggregators, and Google is killing theirs which is maybe the best and most useful?
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.
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+.
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.
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.
I'd love that kind of comparison that also includes if there is any desktop (linux hopefully) app support too. I've been using google reader and liferea to keep my rss feeds synced between devices and to avoid re-reading things i already saw.
723 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadSad 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.
[1] http://memamsa.com/start/gr
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.
No need to be mean to a nice guy. :-\",
Maybe it's just what I've happened to see, but my impression is th I certainly had to do a lot more upgradingat the PHP platform security issues were more frequent and more substantial than RoR has been. I certainly had to do a lot more upgrading. Maybe it's different these days.
But the major difference I've seen up close is that RoR makes it much easier for average programmers to be productive while still coding securely. If I'm going to be running J. Random Hacker's code on a personal server, I'm going to worry less with Rails.
All that said, I'd also be reluctant to install a Rails app. Just less reluctant than PHP.
However, the fact that it supports PHP 4.2 and MySQL 3.23 makes me wonder how old the code base is! Makes me think it's using so many obsolete PHP methods, the deprecated MySQL extension, and is all procedural code (which almost always seems to be spaghetti code with PHP).
So I wouldn't call it customizable.
Combined with Instapaper, I have feel like I have achieved the perfect reading workflow.
Beggars can't be choosers. :)
That's the hard part. Reader integrates nicely with Android's Listen (podcast app), and the reader app, and there's plenty of standalone clients that sync with Google.
That's my most-used Google app. By far. Colossal disappointment.
I honestly don't know what I'm going to do now. As far as I'm aware, nobody besides Google has been archiving RSS history for the past few years. It's a massive pain to dig for old podcast episodes any other way, as full feeds are extremely rare.
Pretty sure you can sync with your Google Reader account and then delete it from the app, and it'll remember your subscriptions. Just deleted mine and it works fine.
If someone wants a pitch here: don't go for a reader, go for a simple WebDAV like system to keep feeds in sync cross-app with APIs so simple that every dev would include it in its feed reading app!
Then your mail client becomes your RSS client. Gmail has j/k key bindings, is relatively unadorned, and facilitates your skim / skip workflow. Excerpts might require some work, but perhaps you could coerce them into the subject line.
Aaron Swartz wrote a nice RSS to email gateway btw: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/
I have a crappier one that delivers directly into a Maildir, and I use it to read news in mutt: http://search.cpan.org/~acg/rssdrop-0.2/rssdrop
Here's a little bit I wrote about using rss2email + emacs. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HOWTOReadFeedsInEmacsViaEmail
You never use Google Code Search RIP?
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
By the way, interface looks cleaner, I wish so were the intentions :-)
[0] http://theoldreader.com/pages/privacy
Perhaps The Old Reader just does the same?
http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/45337829605/unexpected-day...
Other alternatives I tried are also disappointing. July 1 will be a terrible day for the Internet.
http://theoldreader.com/feeds/import
"Thank you for uploading your OPML file. We will soon start importing your subscriptions, which might take up to several hours depending on the amount of feeds you have.
There are 22325 users in the import queue ahead of you."
It may take some time indeed... I have 114 subscriptions and some of them can be dead now, as I haven't used GR for quite some time.
Any suggestions?
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/reeder/id325502379
[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sunstroke/id488564806
[1] http://tt-rss.org/
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...)
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...
What is the best alternative RSS reader ??
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.
> There are 41600 users in the import queue ahead of you.
I bet they're happy right now.
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.
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
EDIT: And OPML is the other option when you signup. It's an easy import process, since it's really quite important to get that part right.
A small warning: the OPML import will delete you current sites and replace them with the ones from OPML, they will not be merged with the current ones you have.
http://www.dataliberation.org/google/reader
That said, I lament the lack of a desktop app. I've been using Reeder for OS X, and I'd really like to have some sort of desktop app instead of relying on my iPhone or a website. Have you considered talking to existing app makers (e.g. Reeder) to see if they might want to switch over to using your service as their backend?
Conesus: Have you considered running a Kickstarter for a desktop version of NewsBlur, in order to gauge interest? I'd definitely contribute.
I used to use GR every day, then on a whim I switched the free newsblur version. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't offer me a lot more than GR did, but after hitting the 60 feed limit a couple of times I've now gone paid and I'm happy to support a service that does exactly what I want it to do. It would have been nice if it imported by saved(or linked or started or whatever they were called in the end) stories from GR though.
One peeve though, I have no idea how to manage my feeds. Is there any easy way to move them round through drag-and-drop? It appears I have to move them manually one by one, but I have a lot of feeds and I'd rather not do that!
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.
Now is too late. The right time to have started building it was 2-6 months ago. Now is the time to market an existing solution.
Citing the great gretzky quote, the "puck" is already here.
I mean-- err, yes, totally too late! Don't worry about it.
We've been working on it for the past few months.
http://www.frontpageapp.com
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.
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Not pretty but have some real examples. Please post your own and paste a link here or in the comments.
--------
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.).
That kind of thing is never going to help
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchco.de%2...
Kalzmeus on SEO (click around his blog for more, guy's a genius): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
Also some quick, simple advice:
1. Blog 2/3 times per week minimum. Target a single, relevant keyword per blog post (relevant to your domain). The post title, H1s, H2s etc, image tags should all contain your primary keyword. Blog posts don't have to be long, but they do have to be useful.
2. Build a G+, FB, Twitter account for your site if you haven't already. Blast out your new posts to these accounts using Hootsuite (free, but you can pay if you like).
3. Build an audience on the social networks - just search around, follow relevant people and share useful, educational material. Don't spam.
4. Personalised mass email from Google Docs and Gmail (kind of hesitant to recommend this in light of Google shuttering services!): http://www.labnol.org/internet/personalized-mail-merge-in-gm... you need to have "newsletter" signs ups (blast out a digest of your blog posts once per month), calls to actions etc on your site for this to work properly (i.e. optimise your site to capture names & emails). Great, low cost/free way to make sure your audience stays engaged and coming back to your site. You can pay for this kind of service too, e.g. Mailchimp (they've a free tier), Constant Contact, or the likes of Hubspot for full suite of marketing automation tools.
5. Best of Startup marketing/SEO here, that I've compiled over the years (absolute gold): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag_fyIIMSJ6DdGt...
6. Check out Sell More Software by patio11: http://www.hyperink.com/Sell-More-Software-Website-Conversio...
Many engineers don't fully appreciate marketing as patio11 would be quick to point out, but there's a start.
I would seek out professional SEO company's and try to find the best deal. No way anybody could do all this stuff by themselves. In the end, it will be a worthwhile investment. From my own experience it's very time consuming to get it right.
However if you're a bootstrapped company, you may not have a choice but to put the time in yourself rather than paying for professional SEO services.
If you have a technical and non-technical co-founders, this list is a large chunk of what the non-technical guy should/will be doing.
Building a great product that people want is pointless without letting people know about it.
With backstitch (http://backstit.ch) we get questioned a lot why Google is no longer supporting these types of services (and if this means there is no opportunity there since they aren't worried about it anymore). We honestly feel like there is a lot of surface left uncovered when it comes to personalized/streamlined content and it just doesn't seem to be part of Google's refocusing (this has been seen with the shutting down of a lot of their lab projects as well).
In my industry merchant accounts are very difficult to come by. We are considered high risk. Even with a year of processing records showing 1 chargeback out of >3k transactions I can't get access to a merchant with decent rates(currently paying 3.7%). All the big players turn us away. There's gold to be mined off the beaten path.
I tried to add this feed, for example: http://denver.craigslist.org/search/cto?maxAsk=28000&min...
without success, but it could be your server getting hammered.
It was super simple to import my feeds from Google and I find that the navigation in NewsBlur lets me read/scroll through items (and ignore articles that aren't interesting) much faster than Google Reader.
Anyone looking for a Google Reader substitute, definitely give NewsBlur a try!
I think that's a testament to how functional your app is. The iPhone app, while not up with Reeder (the iPhone app), is still very solid.
I look forward to the redesign too. The beta site looks great!
Intigi is a paid service, primarily targeted at marketers, but we do have a number of startups and founders using the product for content discovery and sharing. You can quickly share content you find to social media, a WordPress site, or to an RSS feed (e.g., to connect with IFTTT).
I'm one of the cofounders and happy to answer any questions about the service and would love any feedback, if you decide to give it a test spin. Please email me at mjfern(at)intigi.com.
It works from the browser, including mobile browsers, and native apps are coming. There's also an OPML importer, though currently experimental, and subscriptions can be consumed as OPML, RSS, etc.
Can anyone confirm that the Android Listen app will cease to function (i.e. refresh your existing feeds) once Google Reader is shut down? Am pretty sure that it relies solely on Google Reader's "Listen Subscriptions" tag for refreshing your podcast feeds, so that's definitely another gap that needs filling.
The project site is here http://rivers.silverkeytech.com and you get the app here http://goo.gl/kShgp.
The app is a bit young but it is maturing rapidly. I deploy a new version every two weeks or so. The next update is due in a few days.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/giving-you-better-goo...
Might be worth a post or two
http://www.cloudflare.com/plans
(In fact it only caches certain static files as determined by their file extension. It does not seem to pay much attention to Content-Type of Cache headers. Ugh.)
http://rssminer.net/demo
I hope HN finds it useful too. It's also fully open-source too: https://github.com/shenfeng
I need, 100%, to see my content in forward-chronological order (most-recent-last).
I've already given $24 for a year of NewsBlur, and I am super excited about being able to share and comment again. But, I know I'm not alone in wanting correct sorting.
Just 1-2 things I miss: - how can I mark an article read/unread? - could I delete an entire folder? - is there a limit on the number of feeds it can handle (I tried to import from reader, and I miss some feeds/folders)
Nice app btw. The only good thing from GR closure might be that the dev community comes up with some real great alternatives. And yes, I hope paid ones.
So, no dear this doesn't cut it.
It lets you display RSS feeds (and bookmarks, tasks and notes) in a similar layout.
(Also plugging a side project of mine :-))
Else, the first thing people try to do is find a way to close/remove/delete it so they can get started, which leads to the down arrow on it, which doesn't work to delete it. And now they're stuck wondering how to delete it...then they close the window without even tasting something they may have enjoyed.
After you register you start with a completely empty panel which you can then fill with your own blocks.
Sorry for the confusion, I'll try to make it more clear :-)
(1) It lets you add subscriptions to regular websites without an RSS feed.
(2) It lets you search for articles that were published before you subscribed to the feed.
I think you could add (2) simply by redirecting to Google search using the site:sitename.com argument.
(1) may not be that simple to add but it would be an incredibly important feature to have.
But it irks me that a service I've been using for however long just one day decides to cut my quota by 80%.
It doesn't exactly spur me to start paying.
Is there a win8 version (win store, not desktop).
tks
https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commit/f5ec4fa37d0a81...
Hopefully it will go back to 64 once things get under control.
"NewsBlur experienced an error
The error has been logged and will be fixed soon so you won't have to see this message again."
Make sure there is an export feature, for some reason, I can't find it, and I'll be a daily user.
The layout feels visually ... cluttered? ... but the functionality is excellent so I'm happy. Also the Google Reader import failed the first time, but succeeded the second.
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.
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...
Google already killed reader in their hearths when they made the g+ update. Instead of neglecting it for years to come they did the right thing and let it go for good.
https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-r...
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.
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.
Because they would rather that you use Google+. The writing was on the wall when they started disabling features a year or two ago.
Would be interesting to see a marketshare breakdown.
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.
The worst part is how the big guys kill all competition with their free products leaving few alternatives for users.
The real pain comes when your email address is no longer valid. You have to hunt down everyone you've ever communicated with to give them a new one. A lot of older, and more casual, contacts will be unable to reach you.
Tomjen isn't my name, but it is close enough.
I was talking about the 99.999% of the human race that doesn't frequent HN. If they buy a domain name with email when Google announces that GMail is sunsetting, it's already too late. Old/casual acquaintances, friends of friends, etc. will only have their gmail.com address.
Jokes aside, that would be horrible. I've a domain with GApps but I think my chat is still stuck there. Any ideas how can I break free and still able to chat with my friends(Gmail, Fb and some Yahoo) and have chat transcripts somewhere. Anyone?
http://archivemail.sourceforge.net/
It stores the mail in a folder tree rather than a single file, but that's fine by me. It's open source & cross platform.
Unfortunately, nothing. However Google makes it really easy to export this data.
Of course, somehow, spam needs to be tackled.
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.
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.
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.
The service itself at that level is comparatively straightforward. Hopefully someone (twentyfivesquares?) will step up and offer a replacement. I'd be willing to pay.
If an ad supported feed provider fails to add ads to their feed they just do not understand the medium. One of the core ideas in RSS is to avoid visiting all the subscribed sites!
They could compete with a solid mobile app / desktop app and monetize that. Lots of ways to leverage it against Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. All those services are building freaking news aggregators, and Google is killing theirs which is maybe the best and most useful?
It seems really lame and evil.
What I'd really like to see here on HN is a post comparing other RSS contenders like NewsBlur and The Old Reader.
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.