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Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh
- rachelbythebay 13y agoNot many people seem that interested in my approach to solving the feed reading problem. I run my own backend and frontend and just let it fetch things for me. Then I periodically check in and flip through to see what's new. If I wind up on some new platform on which the web frontend doesn't make sense, I'll write a native one which speaks the same simple "POST in, AJAX out" language. No big thing. I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some, but it seems the momentum just isn't there yet.
- yuhong 13y agoBTW, OT but what do you think of Larry, Sergey, and Eric?
- coolsunglasses 13y agoYou can't send an email?
- yuhong 13y agoI did (via the contact form), but no response was received.
- coolsunglasses 13y agoYou'll have to let me know how getting ignored in two different mediums feels. Protip? Getting people to talk to you is another form of sales. Also, don't ask questions in public for which the answers that could cause them to get blacklisted in their field of choice. That's a pretty good way not to get an answer. Rachel tends to be a drive-by participant in this community. Look at the comment/post history and the profile which is exceedingly well tuned. Lastly, why do you care what IT people that used to work for Google think of the Triumvirate?
- rachelbythebay 13y agoThank you for responding to the central point and not attacking the author's identity.
- coolsunglasses 13y agoIt wasn't about you at all, but your consistency is well noted.
- yuhong 13y agoI was trying to figure out what went wrong at Google.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rachelbythebay 13y agoI never met any of them. I doubt they'd know me if they saw me.
- dmbass 13y agoHave you heard of Newsblur? Sounds exactly like what you're describing. API: http://www.newsblur.com/api http://www.newsblur.com/api Open Source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur Also, cheers for not including a link to your Kickstarter.
- rachelbythebay 13y agoI saw Newsblur quite some time back, maybe in 2011 when I decided to move myself off Reader. It didn't look like anything I wanted: so many frames! Reader itself had a whole bunch of stuff which got in the way. One time I tried mocking it up with most of that stuff gone and I liked what I found. That's the sort of ideal I went for with my own thing: enough of a bar so people know it's a feed reader and not some scuzzy content thievery site (since they arrive when they see it in their referrer logs), and a way to flip through the posts. The Kickstarter was an attempt to try something really "out there" for me and see if it would work. It looks like it will not.
- conesus 13y agoHit shift+E then shift+F. That opens "Everything" which is the river of news, then fullscreens it so it's a single framed river of news.
- davidjohnstone 13y agoThe nice thing about NewsBlur is that it exposes the API so that, if you want, you can make a completely new front end for it. This is what I did: http://www.altfeedreader.com/ http://www.altfeedreader.com/
- Cyranix 13y agoNewsBlur is also YC S12. I can't say I've tried them all to compare fairly, but I'm quite pleased with NewsBlur for my feed-reading needs. Samuel Clay has been quite responsive to the few GitHub issues I've filed, too.
- waveman2 13y agoFrom her profile http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-reader-extraordinaire http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-rea...
- dantiberian 13y agohttp://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-reader-extraordinaire http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-rea...
- anigbrowl 13y agoI'm curious but helpless, what's it called so I can learn more?
- swanson 13y agoYep - I have the same approach. My subscriptions generate 5-10 posts a day, I look at them once in the afternoon, mark all as read and move on. Open sourced mine here: https://github.com/swanson/stringer https://github.com/swanson/stringer - it's <10 minutes to deploy an instance to Heroku and be on your way. All the data is in your own database - do whatever the hell you want with it.
- coolj 13y agoI've been looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing!
- a3_nm 13y ago> I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some You could also, you know, just release what you have as open source without asking people to pay $30,000 for the privilege?
- rachelbythebay 13y agoIt's not that simple.
- pbreit 13y agoI can't imagine there'd be much interest in so such a thing just to read blogs. It probably goes without saying that, perhaps despite appearances, Kickstarter projects require a massive amount of marketing to have any hope of success.
- halcyondaze 13y agoWho knows, the demise of Google Reader seems to be spawning a lot of cool projects and Show HN's. I don't think it's the end of the world...seems to be driving forward innovation.
- ElbertF 13y agoLet me emphasise your point with a bit of shameless self-promotion. It may not be what the OP is calling for but some of you might like it. It's a web based feed reader that I've been working on since before Google announced the imminent shut down of Reader. http://Readable.cc http://Readable.cc
- icelancer 13y agoI've tried most. Not a single one has 80% of the usability of Google Reader.
- firlefans 13y agoBy usability you surely mean something other than the traditional sense of the word. Exactly what was usable about the Reader interface?
- zanny 13y agoFolders, drag and drop feeds between them, the caching of entries Google did, and the Android app was ok, and it didn't install some browser crushing plugin to work, it was a website.
- notatoad 13y agoOne thing the google reader apocalypse seems to have taught us is that everybody's sense of entitlement is way too damn high. Feedly is documented. Type "feedly keyboard shortcuts" or "feedly tutorial" into google and you'll get all kinds of good (and concise) information. The fact that you didn't try to find any documentation doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- anigbrowl 13y agoType "feedly keyboard shortcuts" or "feedly tutorial" into google Um...
- voltagex_ 13y agoI installed the feedly extension and it proceeded to trash every page I viewed by inserting itself at the bottom. Even in plain Javascript files I was viewing
- mehrzad 13y agoYeah it's a weird default that is quickly disabled but the point is moot now that we have a full web client of Feedly.
- mhaymo 13y agoThanks for the info, might check it out again this weekend then.
- ernesth 13y agoUnfortunately, if you get disconnected from feedly (like you do not use it for two weeks or you are in incognito mode), it no longer respects your preference. So the default should definitely be the other way around
- adestefan 13y agoI used feedly for 5 minutes, saw that stupid little button, and quickly uninstalled. I refuse to use some that invasive.
- philthesong 13y agoI don't understand the hate with the decision of Google shutting down the Reader. Apparently, the Reader users aren't worth that much.
- camus 13y agoOnly a worthless person can say something that worthless. You are not worth anything. See i can write that too.
- epistasis 13y agoWhen Google makes the decision that I'm not worth much, I'm tempted to reciprocate. DuckDuckGo is already becoming habit, and I'm pretty close to convincing others in my company that we need to switch off of Google Apps, because Google hides important messages from me and doesn't provide support [1]. What else does Google do? Drive? Dropbox is better. Plus? Haha. Google is putting all their effort behind things they're only mediocre at, chasing after the fashionable new kids on the block, and dropping the ball on their core competencies. Maps will keep me around for a while though. However, a maps app that cared about my privacy would win me over... Every giant sees their peak and gradual decline. Google's just came very quickly. I hope they see a renaissance. [1] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/aU4UUye3dbs http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/aU4UUye3...
- achompas 13y agoYou can't hand-wave away the fact that Gmail, Docs, and Maps are best-in-class.
- epistasis 13y agoOf course I can, particularly if they are best-in-class in a class that is not relevant to me. I'm not going to use web apps for email or for office documents, except for edge cases. And that is the case for most people in the world, web apps are a nicety, but not the primary use case. Maps, as I said, are different.
- lobster_johnson 13y agoI'm fine with Reeder switching to Feedbin, but why couldn't the author update the desktop all at the same time as the iOS client? This means there is a gap where Reeder on the desktop just won't work correctly.
- easyfrag 13y agoThe iPad version of Reeder also doesn't have Feedbin support yet.
- whytaka 13y agoI wish Pocket would adopt Feedly's UED and discovery engine, or that Feedly would pick up on Pocket's browser extension and archiving ability. That would be almost perfect.
- Yhippa 13y agoI never thought of that. I really like Pocket's simplicity and ubiquity. If they could somehow pull it off I would be so pleased. That would be quite the pivot for them though.
- tonetheman 13y agoWhat is really missed is the larger picture. People who used/use Reader digest information. A lot of information and quickly (at least if you are using it correctly). They are often the hubs in social/meme networks. I find cool stories all the time and propagate those stories out. It is hard to value that, if there is value there at all. When the demise of Reader had been announced, bluntly feedly sucked. It looked like Pintrest (is that bad?) It was missing the key feature in a reader... the reading part. Pictures are nice and layout is ok, but seriously I just want to read really quick. Feedly has gotten better or maybe I just have figured out the correct way to use it? Hard to say. What I have really learned from google closing reader is that you cannot trust someone you are not paying with your data. And maybe you cannot even trust someone you are paying... how depressing.
- fpgeek 13y agoNo maybe about it. You can't trust someone you're paying either. See: - Sparrow and all the other companies who were acquired and saw products killed - the countless other companies that just went out of business - the problems you run into when hiring people to develop custom software - and so on There is no substitute for individually (and regularly) assessing the risks and benefits associated with all the software and services you use. And even then, you will make mistakes.
- kylec 13y agoI'm a Reeder user myself, though 99% of my reading is done on the Mac version. So far, ReadKit ($4.99, MAS) is the closest thing I've found to a replacement. I'd still prefer Reeder, but I can comfortably live with ReadKit if need be.
- elithrar 13y agoI use Reeder (iOS) w/ Feedbin (https://feedbin.me/ https://feedbin.me/), and the Feedbin web UI on the desktop. Reeder for OS X is scheduled to get Feedbin support in the near future.
- lucian1900 13y agoiPad and OS X versions of Reeder have been scheduled to get support for more services for quite a while now. I'll believe it when I see it :)
- jacoblyles 13y agoFeedly is an example of an app that is extremely over-designed in a counterintuitive way. It is a remarkable case of form over function. "There's a list of articles, one per line, stacked vertically on the screen. After you've scanned your eyes to the bottom of the screen, how do you see more? You scroll it up, right? Ha ha ha. No. You swipe right. Madness." Oh. THAT'S how you do it. I thought it was impossible to scroll down a list of articles. When you swipe down on an article list, feedly alternates between showing you a single article and a portion of the article list. I have no idea what the intended function is. And do the different width bars on the homescreen mean anything? I switched to newsblur which looks like it's from 2003 and has a terrible home page. But at least it doesn't surprise me.
- nickpinkston 13y agoFully agree! It doesn't hold a candle to the gReader interface...
- davidjohnstone 13y agoI definitely agree. Once made to show full items by default, Feedly became acceptable for how I use a feed reader. However, this option only appears to be available on the desktop site, and not on the Android app, and all the other options feel too weird; the cards and magazine layouts look pretty, but are completely unusable ("I just want to read my feeds!). Yoleo almost does it for me, except I sorely miss the ability to scroll through a list of unread items (it forces us to hit J or click on the next entry in the third column to make the next item visible). I find the NewsBlur UI awfully clunky, and I will admit that I can't bring myself to actually using it as the replacement. However, it exposes an API, and I built a much simpler UI for it: http://www.altfeedreader.com/ http://www.altfeedreader.com/ — it doesn't do everything that NewsBlur can, but it does 99% of what I want in a feed reader. In the end, I haven't settled on what I will use, and there's still Digg Reader (to be released tomorrow) and AOL Reader (released, but buggy enough to prevent me from adding anything when I tried it).
- jamiebikies 13y agoI'm working on a "headline mode" that's going to let you scroll through your articles.
- chaz 13y agoWell, the good news for jwz is that these all seem pretty fixable. It's come a long way since the version I first saw after the Reader announcement. It took me a long time to warm up to Google Reader, and for it to have enough features for me. I was a Bloglines user for quite some time. Change is hard. http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/21/summary-of-the-last-100-days/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/21/summary-of-the-last-100-da...
- hawkharris 13y agoMany startups are trying to consolidate news and social media posts — to become, basically, a one-stop shop for users. I understand that this offers greater convenience, but it also overlooks something people enjoy about the Internet. People like having different websites and services to check, with notifications unique to each one. It's kind of like spreading out your Christmas presents instead of tearing them open all at once.
- jsherer 13y agoI agree. This is my approach for http://mnmlrdr.com/ http://mnmlrdr.com/ — no social integration because a lot of people are only interested in reading their feeds, not talking about it in their reader app.
- hawkharris 13y agoThat's a cool. I like the simple, elegant interface.
- seldo 13y agoI appreciate his position but I have trouble taking advice on UI from somebody whose blog is eye-burning neon green text on a black background and has been since 1995. We know you're l33t, Jamie, you are a living legend. Can I get a readable color scheme already?
- 4a3f35b5a 13y agoAm I the only one who finds it hilarious that someone's complaining about UI of the source when the stuff under discussion already cleans up things for you and makes it readable?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- seldo 13y agoAlmost nobody uses feed readers, which is why Google shut down Reader in the first place. You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority.
- aclevernickname 13y agowhat kind of geek doesn't have EZRSS and a few other torrent feeds fed into Sickbeard or FlexGet for automatic television/movie/game downloading?
- seldo 13y agoI didn't say I don't use RSS; I just don't use it for news (or any kind of reading). I plumb it into automation quite often, though.
- aclevernickname 13y agoand you use google reader for your plumbing? does that not seem a little robust for such an activity?
- FilterJoe 13y agoWhile I share the author's frustration that Google Reader is going away, I don't get all the hostility toward Feedly. In just a few months' time, they've replicated by far the most important aspect of Google - serving as a backend for any front end reader that choose to use their API. I too tried the Feedly iOS app and found it didn't suit my workflow and stylistic preferences. But I didn't need it. My favorite way of consuming news over the past couple years has been with Newsify, with Google Reader as back end. Now my favorite way continues to be Newsify, but with Feedly as back end. The transition was seamless. My only 2 complaints are: 1) I was only able to import 1000 starred items into Feedly. 2) No search - but that's coming. So - I wish I hadn't had to spend a dozen or two hours over the past few months evaluating alternatives to Google Reader. But I'm quite happy that Feedly stepped up to take Google Reader's place.
- fpgeek 13y agoExactly. Pretty much from the beginning of the Readerpocalypse, I'd decided to go with whatever the developers of my apps did. Both Press and gReader decided to support Feedly, so that was simple enough. There were a few hiccups in the transition (initial bugs, creating my Feedly account in-app was confusing), but now everything is working as smoothing as it did with Google Reader. I can even directly compare that, since I've switched to Feedly on my phone but not on my tablet (yet).
- greatquux 13y agogReader Pro on android has worked pretty darn well now that the bugs have been shaken out. I'd definitely recommend it over the pretty but useless feedly interface.
- ababab 13y agoFWIW, I started a vague attempt to round up the alternatives: https://github.com/smithbr/rss-readers-list https://github.com/smithbr/rss-readers-list
- nicholasalias 13y agoGreat list. You missed a few. Feeder.co (my preferred alternative), Stringer, and probably a few more. Check out Russell Beattie's blog post here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/readerpocalypse-the-alternatives http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/readerpocalypse-the-alter...
- dirkk0 13y agoAlso https://github.com/glynnbird/birdreader https://github.com/glynnbird/birdreader , a nodejs based open source project.
- whyenot 13y agoAfter waiting and waiting for Reeder to update their Mac version, I decided to go back to an old friend, NetNewsWire. It does not sync between devices, but that's ok for me. In fact, I kind of feel good about the fact that now there is no online entity keeping track of what feeds I subscribe to and what articles I read. ... well, if not none, at least one less entity keeping track.
- rocky1138 13y ago"All I want is a version of Reeder that stores my .newsrc on Dropbox." Get coding. This sort of angst is the inspiration behind a ton of open source projects.
- pbsdp 13y agoDid you seriously just try to give jwz 'get coding' open source advice?
- rocky1138 13y agoYup. The advice is sound regardless of who it is. In fact, if he's as good as we think, we should get something good out of it!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jobigoud 13y agoFor your interest : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
- darkarmani 13y agoWhat have you done for me lately?
- fpgeek 13y agojwz is just a bit behind because he's on iOS. As of this writing, only one iOS app (Newsify) is ready while two Android apps (Press and gReader) and a widget (Pure News) are. See: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/19/feedly-cloud/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/19/feedly-cloud/ This will presumably be sorted out soon. Perhaps the combination of Feedly's late deployment and Apple's approval process have complicated things for some developers. I did notice that both Press and gReader had to bugfix their initial Feedly support. I can certainly imagine an iOS developer having a harder time dealing with a late-breaking issue like that.
- cloudmaster 13y agoInterestingly, the guy who wrote NetNewsWire says Dropbox and RSS readers can't work together: http://inessential.com/2011/10/25/why_just_store_the_app_data_on_dropbo http://inessential.com/2011/10/25/why_just_store_the_app_dat...
- jobigoud 13y agoIt might not work for all scenarios, but it can work. At some point I used RSSBandit (Open source desktop RSS reader for Windows), and I set up its %appdata% directory to be a subdirectory in the Dropbox folder. This can be done by modifying one of the config.xml files in the program's files. It worked. The whole state of the application was shared between computers. Desktop app, synchronization between home and work, that was all I needed.
- nissimk 13y agoThank you for that link. It's very interesting. I'm working on a protocol for brass reader that is similar to what he describes. It uses a shared filesystem like dropbox as the communication medium but it is a change set based protocol. I'm still not sure if it's going to work, but I'm going to give it a shot.
- snogglethorpe 13y agoI don't really share most of jwz's specific complaints, but I've been trying to use feedly, and boy .... it's really hard to believe so many people are recommending this as a general Google reader replacement. Besides its somewhat quirky UI, the main problem I have with feedly is that it seems predicated on the assumption that you will more or less read through all articles, one by one, in order, and finish them. That's not how I use reader at all. I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category. Yadayada. Feedly basically flattens and linearizes everything, and doesn't give any summary information, so I constantly feel unsure what's available without looking, and once I look, I quickly get lost in the undifferentiated flow of articles. Of course Google reader also allows a more "feedly-style" one-big-stream mode of operation via its summary feeds. Except that it does a better job of it by allowing multiple different views, and provides summary information for all of them too. And despite all that flexibility and power, Google reader's interface seems far simpler than feedly's... it's really just a tree-list-view thingy like we're all used to from a zillion apps, and everything just sort of works like you expect it. It does all that, and because it's web-based, everything's always in sync no matter where you read. It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps, but it works pretty well on smartphone browsers (and even on dumbphone browsers, although it started to flake out during authentication a few months ago, presumably because Google wasn't keeping it updated). So basically reader's about a zillion times better, with one glaring exception: it's going away... TT [The closest free replacement I've found so far is "yoleoreader", which kinda gets the vibe right, although it's a bit rough in places...]
- Orva 13y ago> I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category. I was seriously starting to think I am only one who wants this from web-based rss-reader. Most of the native rss clients are built around this behaviour and I really cannot understand why web readers don't. Maybe A/B testing with bad test cases (or without enough diverse user population) or maybe we are just crazy. > It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps Android at least has. It was/is really nicely hidden under all unofficial, privacy violating rip-offs in the Google store.
- zobzu 13y agoI liked reading that. More people need to voice their true opinion, unhidden being politically correct sentences. Else we end up with various shitty software that we end up thinking are the gold standard.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- abalone 13y agoSyncing feeds is a little bit harder of a problem than the author lets on. It's not just about storing a state file in dropbox. It's also about efficiently pushing the delta of what's new. A central service is vastly more efficient at that than millions of clients pulling their own feeds. But I 100% agree that Reeder is (was) the awesomest client and all I need to be happy is a backend replacement that just Makes Reeder Work. I don't have to care about Feedly's UI if it's just a backend. There was a press release at the beginning of the month about Feedy & Reeder collaborating.. what's the ETA? We're really down to the wire here. http://www.macstories.net/news/reeder-to-add-support-for-feedly-and-feed-wrangler/ http://www.macstories.net/news/reeder-to-add-support-for-fee... Oh, and F U Google. Thanks for the 4 months heads up, dick.
- sage_joch 13y agoGoogle doesn't seem to realize that one of their most valuable assets is trust. And that trust has eroded a great deal in recent months.
- melling 13y agoIt really is time to grow up. They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.
- RockyMcNuts 13y agono, you seized control of an open RSS ecosystem with Reader and Feedburner, made those a platform no one could compete with, and then pulled the plug on the ecosystem. If you don't even understand that, that's why you can't be trusted.
- melling 13y agoOpen Office has seized control of the document suite. Any day now Microsoft is going out of business, and the GIMP is about to destroy Photoshop... Bottom line is if there is a real market for something and someone makes a better product.
- xradionut 13y agoYour analogy sucks and you could have easily fixed it: "If Microsoft gave Office away, destroyed the competition, then killed Office..." Google killed Reader and trust.
- melling 13y agoMy comparison is simply that someone built a solid product and gave it away. Yes, people still pay hundreds of dollars for the same software when Open/Libre Office will work for most people.
- jackowayed 13y agoI was considering various things, with a strong desire for something simple and likely to stay around for awhile. I thought about emacs gnus, Thunderbird, and some of the new entrants. I realized that I would be as happy with something that just sent me a filterable email for every entry in all of my fields, since I already have good interfaces for reading and culling mail on all of my platforms. So I found one. http://blogtrottr.com/ http://blogtrottr.com/ It seemed nice and had an easy import. If something happens to it, I'm sure I can find another. For now I'm filtering it all into its own folder, though I try to keep my feeds pretty low-volume, so it wouldn't even be a huge deal if they all landed in my already-pretty-noisy inbox. I just did that this weekend, but so far I'm quite happy
- Yhippa 13y agoI've tried just about all of them and as July 1 approaches I'm definitely getting anxious that I haven't found an RSS aggregator "home" just yet. I set up Tiny Tiny RSS on a Red Hat Openshift gear and it actually seems to work quite well. My main problem with it is that it doesn't seem to work in anything other than Safari. The mobile options for Tiny Tiny RSS looks like it's going to take some legwork to set up so that will be interesting. It's such a waste since Google already has a decent app that hooks into their API (on Android at least). All of this work by them that makes me very happy only to be ended. Such a shame. I'm really going to miss it.
- tmzt 13y agoI would like to see an argument for not releasing the Google Reader Android app source code, I can't imagine what in there exposes a critical Google service. If that was the concern they could leave that component out. (I'm talking about the internal Android component that provides the Reader login facility and sync option.)
- tallanvor 13y agoI also configured an instance of Tiny Tiny RSS. I found TTRSS-Reader to be very easy to configure - just the url, username and password, and possibly some certificate information if you're using a self-signed one (ok, it wasn't a huge fan of my wildcard certificate, but that's a small problem for me). You just have to enable API access in your account for it to work.
- jareds 13y agoI had no problem setting up YATTRSSC as my mobile client on my iPhone. All I did was check the enable API checkbox in preferences and I was good to go. It’s a PhoneGap app so feels slow and clunky but since I do most of my reading on my computer I tolerate it.
- ilolu 13y agoI need a Reader replacement that lets me export the feeds data later if I want to. I could not find that in Feedly. I don't want to get locked in a service for the same reason. Any suggestions ?
- stefantalpalaru 13y agoTiny Tiny RSS [1] but you need to host it yourself. [1] http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki
- tomovo 13y agoIt is not easy to take any criticism of the Feedly UI seriously from someone whose website is green-on-black. On the other hand, it is true that they have gone a little crazy with "innovations". But as long as they have an API, who cares.
- Void_ 13y agoHe's criticizing user experience, not the color scheme. User experience on his website is just fine.
- jwr 13y agojwz is right. His criticism is remarkably close to my observations regarding both Reeder and Feedly. I am also worried that I won't be able to use Reeder anymore, and try as I might, I can't force myself to use Feedly for any extended period of time.
- anotherevan 13y agoI don't particularly like the way Feedly does things either, but I can maintain that opinion without a lot of vitriol. While it's great that all these new projects have been springing up, I didn't want to entrust my feed reading so something that has been written at the eleventh hour, so have only been looking at options that have been around for a while. (Also, ruling out ones without an Android app, which may or may not be a consideration for others.) Tried TinyRSS which was okay. If I had a better server to run it on it probably would have done the job for me (long story that is probably not germane.) I ended up going with Newsblur. It has an interface similar in behaviour to Reader which is what I like, and although it does have some rough edges it's getting the job done and is established. I figured I'd spring the $24 for a year, and then see what the landscape looks like then.
- mtgx 13y agoIs it me or has Feedly made it harder to switch the interface to titles only recently? I change to that, but it seems to change back after a while. It's very annoying.
- stevewillows 13y agoI was hoping someone would work with EasyRSS (the android app, not the torrent goodness) so it would use the NewsBlur api or something similar. It's sad that the dev is letting the project go with reader.
- ivank 13y agoIf you want the cached feed data from Reader preserved, ArchiveTeam is still collecting OPMLs: http://allyourfeed.ludios.org:8080/ http://allyourfeed.ludios.org:8080/ http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader We've saved about 30M feeds (6TB gzip'ed text) so far, and ~44K unique feeds from a few hundred uploaded OPMLs that we didn't find in the billion of URLs we've crawled. We're also looking for (1) massive URL lists we can grep, in case you have access to one (2) query lists of just about anything that we can use to search for feeds using Reader's Feed Directory. (3) some assistance in writing a few crawlers to discover more URLs on specific sites (I'll try this submit this to the homepage tomorrow as well.)
- cbr 13y agoBy "OPML" they mean the subscriptions.xml file in your Reader takeout .zip It's a list of the feeds you follow.
- woodylondon 13y agoCheck out https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ - tried the usual suspects like Feedly, OldReader etc and did not like them. I have not found anything bad yet about inoreader and about as close to the Google reader as I could get. No iOS app yet :-( but I hear they are coming. NetNewsWire might have have a new version soon so keep an eye on that as well.
- Digit-Al 13y agoWhen I first hear about the pending shutoff I first tried Bloglines / Netvibes. It seemed alright, but there was a weird bug that caused a big panel to take up the bottom third of the screen a lot of the time. I then tried Feedly, but (like some commenters below) just hated the interface. I think I tried another online reader as well, but can't remember what now. I ended up going back to bloglines. I did find a way of getting rid of the massive menu bar that kept appearing at the bottom of the screen, but the problem seems to be fixed now. Getting your feeds into Bloglines is not quite so easy as Feedly, but once you have everything set up it seems to work really well. Still not as good as Google, but the closest I have managed to find so far.
- jsilence 13y agoPlease jwz, write a really nifty and usabe console or desktop RSS reader that syncs easily. (this post ist sans irony or zynism)
- groundCode 13y agothere's the rub - once all the kvetching is done, coders who care enough can just dust off their editors and put something together.
- sauce71 13y agoI'm still in denial.
- veidr 13y ago> I have no interest in reading my feeds through > a web site (no more than I would tolerate reading > my email that way, like an *animal*). I haven't laughed that hard at something I read in a blog post so far this year. And I agree wholeheartedly. Who gives a shit about Google Reader the website? (Apparently, a whole lot of people... but not me.) I only care about the syncing. Like Zawinski, I want a fast, awesome, native RSS reader on all my platforms that stays in sync across them. That's it. I would love to get that for free, but aftern thinking on it a moment, I don't see why anybody would provide that to me for free. Thinking on it a moment more, I realized I would pay some reasonable fee for it. However, non-free means 99% of people won't use it, and this in turn means that there is much less incentive for the makers of said fast, awesome, native newsreaders to support such a service in their app. Except that an RSS newsreader that cannot sync is kind of like a dog turd in a bowtie. An enterprising newsreader maker could bite the bullet and make sync a feature of their app -- but I don't think any of the good newsreader apps cover all the important platforms (for me, Mac, iOS, and Android, but for others Windows and Linux are probably in the mix, too). So I don't know what the solution is.
- unimpressive 13y ago>So I don't know what the solution is. Personal cloud. You have a domain name and you host the sync on cheap hardware in your home. For a single application this seems wildly expensive, but if you had a decent ecosystem of apps it'd suddenly be a bargain. This also has secondary benefits like not sending your data to shady 3rd parties.
- amirmc 13y agoI agree, but I like the idea of having someone else worry about swapping HDDs etc. So I'd want the same thing mirrored (but encrypted) up in the public cloud. I don't want to end up in a situation where all my stuff dies because a disk fails.
- unimpressive 13y ago>So I'd want the same thing mirrored (but encrypted) up in the public cloud. I don't want to end up in a situation where all my stuff dies because a disk fails. The implied parenthetical there is "(Without your permission)", encrypted backups would be miles ahead of where we're at now in terms of security.
- nikcub 13y agoWe learned a lesson that you can't rely on free services like Reader because they likely will eventually be shut down. Reeder is now asking for $5 per month so that is can be sustainable, so isn't the solution just to pay the $5 per month rather than asking one of the free products to imitate what you get from a paid product? You will just be at square one again anyway since even if Feedly does implement all of these changes, you still have a free product that at some point will need to compromise itself through advertising, become a paid product, or shutdown. I really thought the punchline to this post would be 'and this is why its worth paying $5 per month for Reeder. Ranting at Feedly to fix their free product seems to miss the point of why we are all in this situation with the Reader shutdown in the first place.
- Tichy 13y agoI don't think that's the lesson at all. Even a feed reader that charges 5$/month is more likely to go broke than Google. Charging money doesn't guarantee success.
- amirmc 13y agoDoes anyone know for sure that $5 is actually sustainable? Just because it's non-zero doesn't automatically mean it'll be around for the long run.
- smackfu 13y agoExactly. A few services have popped up that are $10 or $15 a year. Probably enough to pay for servicing your account but if the service isn't popular, and there are only 100 users, that developer is not going to commit that much time or energy to the service and may just pull the plug after a year or earlier. As long as they refund your money, you can't complain, right?
- ryanklee 13y agoDoes anybody know for sure that anything is actually sustainable at any price point for any number of users? Buying into a service, either through time or money means risk on the part of a user, no matter free or paid. Something remains open or something closes. Who knows. I hate to sound like a god damned schmuck, but there are no guarantees in life, not the least of which when it comes to such frivolities as rss feeds.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoBut he is right - the Internet was designed to be used in a certain way. One website to rule them all is not the natural state of the web and this is an example
- BitMastro 13y agoI switched to tt-rss last Sunday. I have a cheap VPS that I paid 15$ a year, set up a minimal debian, install nginx and postgresql, let tt-rss import google reader feeds and starred posts and install the mobile app as well. A good looking skin and now I have a nice replacement. Not so difficult
- Nican 13y agoI am surprised nobody mentioned CommaFeed yet; How are people using CommaFeed holding out?
- bcj 13y agoI'm liking it well enough. It's mobile interface isn't good and I haven't tried updating it yet, but it is certainly holding up adequately. While I haven't done any tinkering with it yet, I enjoy knowing that I can make whatever changes to it I like.
- raamdev 13y ago+1 for CommaFeed. I had been in denial about Google Reader shutting down simply because all the alternatives were painful in comparison. Thankfully, I discovered CommaFeed a few days ago and now I'm not dreading July 1st. CommaFeed almost seems too good to be true: it's free; the code is open-source; you can run a self-hosted version. I made a $10 donation to the developer a few days ago and I've stopped looking for my Google Reader replacement.
- mathattack 13y agoAll this hype on Google Reader makes me miss not using it to begin with!
- bhdz 13y agoSince I am leading my efforts into a reading/translating/communicating toolkit I find this very interesting, and personally useful (I need people to share their opinions like that): * There is no documentation My code is not documented, then again I am using the principle idea behind __doc__: Code IS documentation, and I've decided to blend the difference between code, document, and even data. * There is no desktop version My road-map includes a core frame, which has Presentations for Terminal, GUI desktop, and webby version of it (html, css, js, ...)... um yeah... Presentations, Control, Model (model slice, inner model slice, perspectives, view-points): PCM (Present, Control, Model) * There is no Next button! The main web reader I plan to provide, has a Letterbox layout, with next: (chapter, page, etc.) prev: (...), bookmark-tags (alabala bla bla [: some name for the BM]) * + Sequential Layout-ing: Instead of even touching the buttons or mouse, you let the "AI" helper (Wordy) to blurt it out on the terminal paragraph, by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, with tempo and optional "accenting"... Just like a kid listening to his father telling stories. You have the option of speeding up the tempo, or simply push it forward * +Convo-trees Trees of Conversations (Documents outputed and printed) This is highly wondorous tool which I still conceptualize with the following scenario: You are a Weed Farmer with A blog, mail, etc. You want to communicate with your prospective buyers, but you don't want cops in your clientele. Therefore, you decided to place a mail on the site, and only after an interview, you decide whether the seeker is a sincere buyer or a cop (or interviewer) under cover. So you have those repetitive tedious interviews with common answers and such, and you WANT to automagicate the process a bit. What if you put Wordy behind the mail-server and make it redirect things it can't respond to, to your advanced intellect? Nice? may be. Depends on Wordy. ... The rest of the arguments OP presents are technical hiccups rather than poor user interface design mal-techniques (choice of paradigms)
- wslh 13y agoOccupy Google Reader?
- seanp2k2 13y agoIt's hilarious when these days, Google is the one sticking to their guns despite public outcry (Reader) and Microsoft is listening to their users in some regard (Xbox One DRM). I really feel like Google is missing the forest for the very intricately engineered trees.
- tterrace 13y agoSwipe to navigate is a terrible design antipattern. I can always tell when I'm reading a blog on blogspot because it'll dump me to the adjacent article when I'm scrolling or trying to zoom in on an image. I dumped chrome on ios because they didn't get it right either.
- metafunctor 13y agoHear hear. Although, I don't remember needing to swipe with chrome on iOS.
- tterrace 13y agoIIRC it's the way to switch between tabs
- nollidge 13y agoI feel like I'm the only RSS reader that never used Google Reader. I used iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized), and then switched to Netvibes a few years ago because of some complaint I can't even remember now. Personally, I prefer to read RSS items on the author's website, and Netvibes suits that. Plus they have a Twitter widget that works even though my work proxy blocks twitter.com.
- coherentpony 13y agoWasn't the Google Reader apocalypse the week following the announcement from Google? You know, when every post on the front page of Hacker News was a Google Reader alternative.
- danielandrews 13y agoAt the risk of being that ass who self promotes, you should check out the service myself and a friend launched yesterday: http://bulletin.io http://bulletin.io is a fast, easy to use RSS reading service that has an open Google Reader lookalike API as well as our own OAuth implementation. Open to feedback from everyone.
- brownbat 13y agojwz hates web interfaces, wants an app. No web version was a dealbreaker for me (until they fixed it). http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/tech/web/feedly-google-reader http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/tech/web/feedly-google-reader I don't want an app of your website. I don't want to give you permission to access every I/O and stored file on my phone. I don't want to help you track me as I drive around town, not using your app, because you're curious why I'm not using it more often. I don't want your program to break if I have to use another machine or borrow a device from a friend (not that you ever should). I don't want your program to break if some company invents a better way to do computing than anything we've ever seen before, but your developers didn't anticipate the architecture, so they won't have an app out the door until that thing is killed off by the next wave. I don't want your program to break because my devices are different than the name brand most people use. I don't want to feed the illusion that a launcher in front of a webapp somehow makes it different, as if it's 1999 and applications are fast and stuff on the internet is slow. Mostly, I don't want your fucking app: http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/ http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/
- pbreit 13y agoI agree with most of the sentiments but definitely not that feed reading should be in an app. I have always found web-based feed readers to feel much more proper (including on mobile).
- crorella 13y agoQQ