[…] twice with them. First time with Google Notebook (an Evernote precursor), and the second time with Google Reader. URL’s are supposed to be forever so I wouldn’t feel comfortable using any service that […]

@Luke:
Hmm, perhaps I should try your “therapy” ;)

I have always kept my list to around 50 feeds, which are those that matter most to me (TI is one of them!). For the rest, I rely on whatever shows up in the social medias.
For the time being, I opted for The Old Reader which is basically a Reader clone. It took a week to get all feeds imported!

Been putting Feedly through the paces and have been pleasantly surprised.

It’s not Google Reader, but you can customize it to look like Google Reader, that is, a more stylistic and typographically aesthetic Google Reader (Preferences -> Titles/Condensed). It synced up my Google Reader account with no problem. Performance has been decent enough and in some respects shines brighter than Google Reader. But still, the search function is lacking (even though it seems to be feeding off Google Reader API). And there’s some hotkeys and preference settings MIA (i.e., hotkey to goto Index, setting to auto-show unread as I care not for read/unread display/counts).

OOTH, that this product is so reliant upon the Google Reader API might mean come July, it simply buckles when it has to perform that crawling and archival on its own.

@ Grzechooo:

Heh… You know what cured me out of that? Subscribing to boingboing.net and few other high frequency blogs at some point. They used to post like 10+ entries per hour and I didn’t want to miss anything. Eventually I figured out it’s not possible to keep up with them – or at the very least not healthy.

@ Peter:

I’m trying to figure out if I should use Feedly or Newsblur. Fever is new to me. I like how their website says “Only $30”. This seems quite high for a desktop RSS reader. :/

@ Rob:

TT-RSS seems interesting. The fact that you have to provide your own server is both good and bad. It’s good because privacy, it’s bad because it’s pain in the ass. I’ll check it out though.

@ pew:

Well… To be honest, a lot of the blogs on that list are now defunct. Others are run by people I know (either IRL or from the web) like Pancake Theorem or Null Program. So I might be biased about liking them.

The rest are not necessarily blogs but shows these days. For example, Twenty Sided used to be wall of text blog about gaming and RPG but nowadays it is mostly videos as the author is pouring his wall of texts into actual books these days.

I watch a lot of stuff from The Escapist and Channel Awesome – so that’s bunch of pure video feeds out there.

The problem with some popular text blogs is that they will often go colab and crank up volume to the point where you can’t really follow them (like Boingboing for example). Some are still manageable (like Jeff Attwoods Coding Horror, Kevin Kelly’s Technium, Bruce Shiner’s security rants and etc..).

@ Chris Wellons:

Well, my goal is to reduce my subscription count to a volume where I could actually do this but I hate deleting things from my list. :P Oh no… Am I a feed hoarder?

@ k00pa:

But that’s a desktop client, no? Does it somehow sync over the cloud? Can you use it at work for example? Does it run on Linux? Those are kinda crucial things for me.

@ Matt`:

Yeah, I just looked at my feed list and it is a total mess. I might post my “important” list at some point but half the blogs seem to be abandoned or in stasis or changed focus since I subscribed. I mentioned a few above. When I get around to cleaning out my feed list, might make a post out of it.

@ Naum:

Very true. There is another side effect I forgot to mention in the blog: for a lot of people Google Reader is RSS. They have never experienced feed reading outside of it, and will likely not search for a replacement. When Reader dies, they will stop reading feeds. So a lot of blogs will loose a percentage of their subscribers overnight. Some people are really concerned about this – especially those who can’t really make a “Google Reader is Dead, Use this thing Now” type post due to the nature and topic matter of their blog.

@ alphast:

Wait… You don’t have to be an IT guy to use Reddit. Just remove stuff like /r/programming and /r/technology from your subscription list. I also subscribe to stuff like /r/SF, /r/books, /r/askhistorians and etc..

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Well, Tasks has been tightly integrated with both Calendar and Gmail. Last time I checked they were being treated as a special calendar type, with tasks being events that don’t need to be associated with a date. And since Gmail needs compete with the likes of Outlook, they need a viable calendar feature. So I think tasks will stick around for as long as calendar will.

I used reader A LOT. And by that i mean: i had >>300 Items in my inbox everyday and i managed to zero that pretty much every day (3-4 weeks per year excluded, where i touch no pc and afterwards pretty much just click on “mark all read”)
The removal of social sharing features was a horrible thing to me, since i used that feature long before it was widely known to build myself an rss-feed with “important” things (more like 2 feeds, one starred, one shared for more/only really important entries).

I replaced those feeds by only having “starred” later, but since then reader never has been the same to me. Those iFrames for +1 were imho a joke, you couldn’t just press ‘l’ while scrolling through your feeds via ‘j’ and ‘k’, no you were forced to actually CLICK on it and after that click back into the main html-frame, because without that you couldn’t continue to scroll via keyboard.

Lately reader felt more and more slow and keept filling my RAM on my AC100-Netbook faster and faster. Currently i only need to open the page to pretty much grind my system to halt. So i were looking for something new anyways.

ttRSS was never an option because of PHP/mySQL-Bullshit that will never run on g33ky.de, but otherwise it’s nice.
I don’t like Feedly, because of it’s UI.
I like TheOldReader better, but that one has currently no Client for my Smartphone.

Currently i’m playing around with rss2email, that’s a small python-script that runs over some feeds and transmits it either via smtp or sendmail (i tried it with smtp and local mail/mutt, having mutt locally and forwarding everything via ssh is a neat feature i still evaluate).
After some problems with the 3 years old version uBUNTu delivered to me, i now installed the current version (that supports opml and the likes, even more authed smtp now WORKS) and everything seems fine until now.

You can tell it pretty detailed how it should behave (config is another python-script) and it seems pretty usable to me.

Time will tell if and how i continue to use it.

BTW: i’ve never really used google notebook, google tasks on the other hand is something i use pretty aggressively through “mail.google.com/tasks/a//canvas” and some android-applications that sync with it. Since it’s seen no new features (Reminders? Time?) since years i guess it probably won’t live forever too.

I use Feedly and I am happy with it. It is not perfect, but it replaces reader advantageously. Also, not being an IT guy, I can not use Reddit or any of the fancy systems. But I need a good RSS news reader for my work (market intelligence) so I need something sturdy.

@ Naum:
Well, regarding archiving, it’s obvious that any new solution won’t have many items from the past. That said, the future poses an interesting problem. There are two ways of building an archive, as far as I can see:

* Just save from the moment someone subscribe to the feed – this worked from Reader because as the dominant player, it had a very large pool of users to feed its archive. It’s doubtful that any other client will achieve any similar position.

* Crawl the web – this is expensive in many ways, and it’s an iffy proposition for any service that doesn’t have cash to burn like Google does.

I think the best solution to this would be to distribute the problem, building something like a DHT for sharing feeds, findable by their URLs (used as keys). On the other hand, much like BitTorrent, this can be abused by leechers and, of course, it removes any upper hand over archiving that some services might have, so I’m not particularly confident it’ll happen. But It’d be nice ;)

With Google Reader vanishing, I feel like I am loosing a good friend. I used Thunderbird’s RSS reader for quite a while before tripping over Google Reader. My main reason for the transition was the same as yours . . . I had many workstations that I worked from and keeping a sync script going was quite painful.

For me, Google Reader was the perfect solution. Besides being a cloud based reader, it had many other positives. I could easily email a story or shoot a link to my favorite social networking site. Once I bought my first Android based phone, the Google apps made everything seemless, especially Google Reader! It just worked.

Feedly has been my crutch. The automagic method of finding all my feeds and bringing them in was awesome. I am getting used to the new layout, especially on Android.

As you have stated, there are positives to come out of this. In the transition, I found many dead or obsolete feeds that needed to be cleaned-up. It also allows someone beside Google to step-up and giver us features in a reader that we never thought we would need.

What that other guy said, about still being in the caring-about-that phase… me too. Around about 100 feeds, selected to be about the right level of noisy that I actually stand a chance of clearing the queue every so often, the noisier ones set to auto-discard after a few days.

To be honest it’s mostly comics rather than news, I should really curate the list down a bit – a lot of these comics aren’t all that funny any more. Maybe make room for better things, or just have fewer things in there. That said, it’s an easy drip-feed of stuff to look at it, and it’s lame when it empties out completely. Maybe more high-volume things on auto-delete… preferably with a respectable signal-to-noise ratio

Sounds like you might have some good pointers, and it’d make for a natural follow-up article too – what do you subscribe to in this carefully selected sub-list of yours? If you do go through the rest to pick out the good ones, what survives?