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Google Reader alternatives: Comparing Newsblur & Feedly

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A couple of weeks have passed since Google dropped a bombshell and announced that Google Reader is to be retired. Since then, I’ve been partly hoping for Google to change its mind – which doesn’t seem to be on the cards – and looking into alternatives. The key features that I’ve been looking for in a Google Reader replacement have been:

  1. A web-based interface
  2. An iOS app
  3. Synchronisation of read/unread items between all clients

The two alternatives that I’ve ended up paying the most attention to have been Newsblur and Feedly, and so I’m going to quickly review them both based on a couple of weeks’ usage.

A screenshot of the Newsblur interface

Newsblur

In the immediate aftermath of Google’s announcement, Newsblur took a massive hammering – it was often unreachable or kept throwing errors. It’s settled down now so that it’s usable, so I’ve had a chance to use it properly.

Newsblur certainly has a lot of features, especially for misbehaving sites where the RSS feeds no longer work. And I’m sure it’ll be awesome for power users. But, for people like me… not so much. The interface is quite cluttered and I can’t see myself using many of the extra features. I’ve also tried the ‘preview’ of the next version, available to paying customers (I paid $12 for a year’s premium membership) but it’s not much better.

There is an iOS app which does the basics, but it doesn’t really work offline. This is a problem for me as I often read my feeds on trains, and don’t always have a mobile signal – damn those Victorian engineers and their tunnels.

So, on the whole, I’m not so keen on Newsblur.

A screenshot of the Feedly interface

Feedly

Feedly is somewhat better, in my opinion. It’s got quite a clean interface, although it defaults to a magazine-style view for each category initially. At first I really didn’t like the web interface, which actually works through a browser extension in Firefox, Chrome and Safari (sorry Internet Explorer and Opera users). You can customise the colours and the way articles are displayed, though.

Today, however, Feedly updated the extensions and it’s now a much more pleasant experience. It still uses Google Reader as a back-end, for now, which means that all of your subscriptions and unread items are synchronised. When Google Reader is switched off, Feedly will switch to its own system, but in the meantime this means the transition is quite easy.

The iOS app is reasonable. It’s attractive, although I imagine it’ll be better on an iPad than my iPhone. Items do seem to be cached for offline reading which is nice, but I did find it a bit slow compared to Reeder, which is what I currently use for Google Reader.

The Old Reader

As a bonus I’ll mention The Old Reader, which is another popular Google Reader alternative, however there’s no mobile apps at present which rules it out.

Other Google Reader Alternatives

I’ve only mentioned three here but there are others – Lifehacker and Mashable have good lists. I’ll probably stick with Feedly although I am hoping that Reeder will work with Feedly in future. Future versions of Reeder will also support Feedbin (a $2/month service) and Reeder’s author is apparently open to other services.

You can also read what my friend Les says on his search for alternatives, although he’s less happy with Feedly than I am.

The demise of Google Reader

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A screenshot of Google Reader with a shutdown message.

Just before I went to bed last night Google announced it was shutting down Google Reader. To me, this news is devastating – I use Google Reader every day to keep up with feeds from blogs and other web sites, and have done almost since 2006, back when it was still a Google Labs product. Others are equally shocked too.

Whilst I’m still saddened by the news, it’s not to be unexpected I suppose. Little has happened to Google Reader over the past few years; the last major redesign was in October 2011 which controversially removed some features in favour of Google+ sharing. Before then, it had been some time since the product had received any attention. Clearly it’s not been a priority for Google for a number of years.

The closure of Google Reader is part of yet another round of ‘spring cleaning’, where Google shuts down under-used services and features. It’s had a few of these now, but this is the first time it’s really affected me (well, apart from ending Exchange support for Gmail, but at least there were alternatives).

Predictably there are already a number of articles about alternatives, from Lifehacker, Mashable and CNet. Both recommend Feedly so I’ll check that out, especially as it appears to have an easy migration path. I’m primarily looking for a web-based reader which will sync with an iOS app, like Google Reader does now. Interestingly CNet also recommends Google Currents, which I’ve heard some good things about. However, Google Currents is not a very well known service and Google’s announcement that Google Reader was shutting down didn’t mention it, so I’m not sure how long that will be around for either.

TechCrunch reckons that FeedBurner will be the next service that Google kills off, as that too has languished for a long time. And iGoogle, which is Google’s customised start page site, will close soon as well having previously been announced for the chop.

The outcry from this announcement has been pretty big and so it’s possible that Google will re-consider – a petition has already amassed 40,000 signatures in less than a day. However, I doubt it will – Google Reader hasn’t been a priority for some years now. There’s three and a half months to go before the doors finally shut so I’ll use the time to look at the alternatives. Google Reader has, thankfully, always had an export feature and this now works as part of Google Takeout . This allows you to carry over your subscriptions to somewhere else in OPML format, plus all of your shares and notes from before the October 2011 redesign.

RSS on the go

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Reading this comment by Dave gave me an idea for a cool feature that I’d like to see some desktop RSS aggregators like FeedDemon to adopt: remote access.

Desktop aggregators are great as they have a nice interface and can work independent of a web browser. But unlike web-based services like Bloglines, they’re not easy to use on the move – if you’re not using your machine then it can be difficult to keep track of what you’ve read. You could find an aggregator that fits on a USB keychain but if you’re in an internet cafe that won’t let you plug those in then you’re stuck.

Remote access, to some extent, solves this. It builds on a feature implemented in P2P clients like eMule and Shareaza, which allows you to administer the client via a web interface in addition to using the desktop interface. This works by the client including a small web server and opening a port on your computer which you can then access from other machines (providing your computer is switched on and has an active internet connection). So, say I have Shareaza running on this computer with remote access enabled – I can then go into university, find a computer, type in my laptop’s IP address and port number for Shareaza’s remote access feature into a web browser, and then login. Once there, I’d be able to see how my transfers were progressing and even do searches and start new transfers through my laptop. And when I got home, those transfers may well have finished. That’s all currently possible.

Now, imagine FeedDemon had this feature. I could go into university, find a computer, type in my laptop’s IP address and port number for FeedDemon’s remote access feature in a web browser, and then login. Once there, I could read the all the feeds I was subscribed to, update channels and add new feeds. And when I got home, the feeds I had read would show up as being read.

I don’t believe any aggregators support that yet but it would be an excellent feature to add, since it would combine the convinience of a desktop aggregator with the ability to read feeds anywhere that a web-based aggregator has.

I’ll Lazyweb this post, just so that it can attract attention.

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