RSS Newspocalypse

As is known to all, RSS is a web format for delivering content, particularly regularly updated content, such as news reports or blog entries. And one can access rss "feeds" in most of the various internet ways: downloaded to your desktop or through a web browser or by using an app on a phone. It turns out however that this kind of media consumption is a niche activity. People who follow and seek out feeds  to discover trends or new content are not nearly as numerous as people who Tweet, Face, or Plus. Social media is the shiz and RSS is fading. Google, accordingly, is going to shutter Google Reader. They'll go off the air on July 1.

Now of course, there are many ways to collect and access feeds, but Google Reader seems to have been a mainstay. A lot of RSS news readers are clients or front ends for Google Reader instead of being standalone programs, and when Reader stops, they will stops. (Unless they find some other service to manage and serve feeds.) In fact, just about every RSS reader I can find will access only feeds you first set up through Reader. And I've been looking, because I want to keep reading the news.

Personally I think Google Reader is ugly as an app, and I haven't ever used it that way. But I do use gReader, a Google Reader client, and it's a great way to work through lots of daily news feeds and read the ones you like. It very usefully offers an offline reading mode. You do one download at the beginning of the day and you get your hundreds of newspaper articles to browse through the rest of the day. I use it a lot to keep current with trends and topics for class. Anyway, when Google Reader goes splut, gReader will too. They're looking into some other services but I don't know what'll happen, so I'm looking into other RSS tools. So far I've found Feedly and FeedR.

Feedly has an Android app. It's hit and miss. It syncs on the go and this slows down the initial reading experience (sometimes a lot). Plus right now it sometimes just doesn't work. Lots of Reader people are looking around. Also, it doesn't do https (yet). Any feeds that might get blocked will screw your sync. It doesn't do full article offline reading either. You tend, as with a lot of rss feeds these days, to get a paragraph blurb, and have to go online to get the rest of it.

FeedR is very old school but works. It is not at all as pleasing as gReader, but it does the job in a pinch. To get full feed download you can route your feed through fulltextrssfeed.com, and there it is, not too messily, on your phone.

I tried Flipbook and Pulse too. Pulse is ugly (and also doesn't do full feed), and Flipbook is labour intensive. Your touching the screen even more than with Feedly. And all these magazine style apps have the common problem of making the whole disappear. You can have a lovely presentation of an article in front of you and have no idea of what other feeds are waiting, how many articles are left, what feeds are hot, where to go next... they're all pretty great for casual glances through info, but poor for shifting through bulk.


Good God that was way more than I intended to write. Shoulda blogged it. So what RSS do you use, and for how long is it going to stay alive?

Google Reader... never used it, never heard of it.... and I am a "computer guy".

I use Sage, a firefox extension.
http://sagerss.com/

I'd never heard of it either until my first rss app choice, Newsroom, was abandoned by its devs and stopped being served. Looking around for a replacement back then, everything seemed to rely on Google Reader. But I'm talking Android phone apps here, so maybe that's it. There seems to be more choices outside the Android ecosystem.

Feedly is getting the best press as an Android replacement for Reader. I find it very irritating. One spends a lot of time watching the spinning wheel on the "Loading" screen.

I use Feverº but you need a server to set it up and it's not free (although not subscription).

I use Sunstroke as a client for Feverº on the iPhone.

I don't know about Android.

It was well known that Google Reader would shut down, there just hadn't been an official announcement from Google with a time frame. Some developers have been readying themselves for it. By July 1st I expect that will be many more choices available.

Stil, I've looked at Fever, but I guess I don't get it. What makes it so great?

It kind of polls all your feeds and ranks the information according to 'what's hot' So let's say all your Chinese news feeds have a story about the river of pigs, and that's the hottest news of the day/week, it will put one headline with access to all the stories about that topic in one place. It's very good for seeing the most imoportant and talked about news of a given time period at a glance. You can incorporate your Twitter feed (or specific accounts) and keywords from Pinboard which is quite a good source of info into the service.

It takes some effort to set up your feeds properly to get it how you want though and it cost $30 for the service itself and you have to set it up on your own server. The service works best the more feeds you have but doesn't give you that feeling that you have too much to check or are getting too far behind in your reading.

If you have a site or blog that you tend to read everything, you can place that in a separate area for access.

Sunstroke for iPhone will send the links to all the services you mentioned. I don't know if there is an Android client.

The web interface for Feverº works well but the web UI is clumsy. I use a Mac client call Chill Pill to control the feeds but it's no great shakes either.

I still used Google Reader but had only a handful of feeds on it that I tend to be interested in all the articles.