Chris Blattman

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The great Google Reader migration of 2013

Where is it moving? Are people converging on a new standard?

I am interested in the general answer, but I am especially interested in hearing my readers’ experiences and preferences.

I am open to helping people coordinate on a particular service.

One of the things I loved most about Google Reader was the ability to “share” with other people. Once upon a time there were about 1000 blog readers who followed my shares, and I in turn followed theirs. The content was much higher quality than the aggregate of my blog feeds, and I enjoyed it far more than Twitter for a number of reasons — easy to scan by eye, for one, and I could see if multiple friends shared the same piece, for another.

Sadly they discontinued this service more than a year ago. It was (very seriously) one of my greatest sources of social and intellectual capital.

If the new RSS reader of choice has such a share function, and I can help the sharers share with one another, I am also happy to facilitate such a network.

14 Responses

  1. I switched to The Old Reader but I’m now no longer receiving new posts from this blog. Anyone have similar issues, or ideas of stuff I could try? Seems to update all the other blogs I follow without problems…

  2. Newsblur and The Old Reader seem to be the only options with in-house sharing.

    The Old Reader has a better user interface in my opinion, but it’s overloaded at the moment. I’ve been waiting for my Reader feeds to import for over 2 days; I was position 46,000 in the queue when I entered it. Newsblur is much faster.

    The downside to The Old Reader is that it doesn’t seem to have any business model (no ads, no subscription fee). Newsblur costs $24/year. The subscription fee is a plus in my mind because it seems like a better business model. I would rather not have to switch readers again in a year.

  3. Currently on Feedly. It enables social network sharing, but not sharing within a network of feedly users, similar to the way google reader did. Another disadvantage of feedly is that it is currently still working on readers backbone. They are working on an independent infrastructure, but I am curious to see how good it will work.
    I miss the sharing feature too and would be happy to join an emerging network. Wanted to test Newsblur, but free testing is currently discontinued so I will only pay the fee once I am sure that the new equilibrium is indeed Newsblur.

  4. Newsblur allows in-house sharing/comments and the ability to follow. Shares are public by default, but if you have a premium account, then you can restrict them to be private to your network . Probably makes sense to wait a month or two before coordinating the reader migration.

  5. After looking over summaries of all the options out there, I think The Old Reader (http://theoldreader.com/) is the best possibility for what you (and I) want. It’s an attempt to recreate the 2011 edition of Reader, including sharing. As far as I can tell none of the other services do that (some offer Facebook sharing, but that’s not at all the same). Assuming that The Old Reader is the only game in town, sharing-wise, it’s also the only reader that is likely to benefit from network effects. There’s not much point to publicly coordinating support for services where the individual experience doesn’t depend on the total number of users.

    If another option also has in-house sharing, I’m all ears. If not, I think we just need to hope The Old Reader gets through its growing pains quickly.

  6. Feedly seems to be what everyone is moving too, because it Just Works. You sign in with Google, it syncs with Reader for now, and they’ve promised that it’ll be on their own backend when Reader goes down. It has mobile and browser versions too. The other options all seem to either a) have a lot of kinks to work out, or b) be trying to be a ‘web magazine’ instead of a feed aggregator. Although I’d love to hear that I’m wrong.

    But it doesn’t have internal sharing, which I do miss.

  7. I’ve opted for Newsblur (www.newsblur.com) and I’m loving it. It was a little slow initially for the massive amount of new users, but it is getting much better. 12$ a year for the premium account (necessary for a heavy user), so far it seems worth it

  8. The Old Reader allows sharing. They are still in beta and have some kinks in their service, but are rapidly ramping up their services and servers. It is pretty similar to the old google reader.

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