Requiem for Google Reader: an RSS behemoth shuts down – The Verge

The Old Reader RSS app closes registration after months of ‘hell’

2013-07-29T22:31:14-04:00

The Old Reader founders

Google Reader is long gone and while a handful of new alternatives have popped up over the last few months, one popular option is essentially closing up shop: The Old Reader. In a blog post, the team behind the RSS reading web app said that they are giving up development on the product because they're simply exhausted from building the product. As of Monday, the web app is no longer accepting new users. And in two weeks, The Old Reader will turn into a private site for those who've registered before March 13th. If you're an Old Reader user who signed up after March 13th, the time to pull your data and move over to another product is now - us …

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AOL Reader enters the RSS fray with a simple, fast app but few differentiating features

2013-06-24T07:02:30-04:00

AOL Reader

As Google prepares for Reader's ultimate shutdown, company after company has emerged from the woodwork to offer replacements for what was once the power user's de facto news reader. AOL was one of the most obvious candidates to launch an RSS reader, and the company has obliged with AOL Reader. It's an RSS app through and through, designed to be as simple as possible for Google Reader ex-pats to get used to - but it borrows from the best of the rest of its competition as well.

Reader begins its life as a fast, simple website that looks quite a bit like Google's own app. It has dark and light themes, and though it's slightly busier than Googl …

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Feedly emerges as key Google Reader replacement with support from Reeder, Press, and more

2013-06-03T15:00:06-04:00

feedly

With the death of Google Reader under a month away, third-party RSS clients will soon need to find a replacement to Google's service. Feedly has been working hard to fill the void, and today it's announcing that it will integrate with the apps Reeder, Nextgen Reader, gReader, Press, and Newsify before the end of the month. To ease the transition for developers, Feedly has been turning its API into a clone of Reader's. It's also been working with those five apps' developers to make third-party integration even more robust.

That should also make it easier for apps that aren't on that list to hook into Feedly as well. Because Reader was the go …

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Reeder for iPhone now supports standalone RSS and Feedbin, Google Reader no longer required

2013-04-27T16:13:06-04:00

reeder hands on

One of the side effects of Google's decision to shut down Reader on July 1st is that numerous mobile and desktop apps are now scrambling for a new way to provide value to their users. Reeder, one of the most popular Google Reader apps for iOS, had previously announced plans to continue development despite Reader's impending shudown, and now there's a new version of the app available that can sync with third-party RSS reader Feedbin. Of course, you'll need to sign up for the $2 monthly fee that Feedbin charges, but after that you'll be free to use Reeder long past July 1st.

Perhaps more noteworthy is Reeder's new, standalone RSS feature - yo …

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RSS isn’t dead: the best Google Reader alternatives

2013-03-19T13:30:01-04:00

Google Reader alts

When I heard Google was planning to kill Google Reader on July 1st as part of a "spring cleaning exercise," I was appalled. Google had decided to disband the team of paperboys that delivered me the news every morning. While RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is years past its heyday, it had become a wonderful and efficient way to read news untarnished by the social networking age. It was my firehose of headlines, straight from the source.

And Google Reader is a lot more than an RSS client. It syncs news feeds between different apps, and makes sure you can always pick up right where you left off. It's also simple and free, which means it drove …

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More than 500,000 Google Reader users claimed by Feedly in two days

2013-03-16T17:01:26-04:00

feedly

Google's controversial decision to shut down Google Reader on July 1st has left its users searching for a new news-collecting homeland, and we now have an idea of the scale of the RSS diaspora. Feedly has announced that more than half a million Google Reader users have signed up for its RSS service following Google's service termination announcement on Wednesday. Feedly also says it's working to keep up with its growth, increasing bandwidth by 10 times and adding new servers. Moving forward, the developers say its main priorities over the next 30 days are to keep the service running, to solicit suggestions from new users, and to add new feat …

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Why RSS still matters

2013-03-14T17:11:04-04:00

Google Reader stock 1020

Google's bombshell last night that it would be shutting down the Google Reader RSS client hit the web, well, like a bomb. Just as with any major tech event, it spurred a raft of reactions on what is currently our best real-time conversation broadcasting network, Twitter. Reactions ranged from outrage to sadness to smugness - the latter epitomized by the camp who say that RSS was already a confusing mess that needed to be shot down completely and besides, it had been replaced by Twitter itself anyway.

Well, no. RSS matters.

Let's start out with some distinctions and, yes, some education - because even though RSS is over a decade old, it nev …

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As Google Reader goes offline, those living under censorship lose vital news source

2013-03-14T17:03:03-04:00

Iranian Ayatollah flickr

For many of us, Google Reader fading into oblivion means we'll need to hunt down another source for our daily news fix. For others, though, the loss is far more significant. As Quartz is today pointing out, Reader has become a critical resource for those living under oppressive regimes in recent years - particularly in Iran. Despite the stranglehold Iran has put on web access with its heavy-handed censorship tactics, Reader has continually provided its residents with uncensored news and views from the outside world. That's because the headlines, snippets, and other items in a Google Reader feed are retrieved from Google's own servers located …

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Digg will build its own version of Google Reader, should sync with existing clients

2013-03-14T14:39:56-04:00

digg stock 2040

Faithful Google Reader users have spent the last day asking themselves what they'll do when the RSS service shuts down on July 1st, and one of the more unlikely options might be coming from Digg. The company just announced in a blog post that it plans to build its own version of Google Reader that "makes the Internet a more approachable and digestible place." The company's vision involves identifying and rebuilding the best features of Reader while simultaneously making it "fit the Internet of 2013." From the sound of things, that'll include plenty of ways to hook your RSS into the social web, as the company explicitly mentioned sites like T …

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Feedly could save Google Reader clients with cloned API

2013-03-13T21:49:34-04:00

Feedly mobile

The impending demise of Google Reader has major implications for the app development community; Google's RSS service had become the de facto standard for third-party clients, and users and developers alike will need to find an alternative. Popular news aggregation app Feedly thinks it has a solution, though - it's been working on a project that clones the Google Reader API, and says that users will see a "seamless transition" once Reader shuts down.

It sounds like other clients will have the option of Feedly's solution, too; a statement provided to GigaOm says that since the Feedly-created API is supposed to be identical to Google's, other …

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