There has been howls of outrage across the web after Google’s earlier announcement that they will be dumping their popular Google Reader RSS service – and we’d like to add our voice to them.
Mashable described the appeal of the doomed service succinctly:
Google Reader is a tremendously useful product; there’s almost nothing like it. When Twitter is full of too much snark and not enough signal, when Flipboard and Pulse and other newsreading apps give you too many pretty pictures and not enough stories per page, there’s Google Reader.
It isn’t particularly pretty. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s line after line of headlines, and you click on them if you want to read the story. There’s nothing else that does that.
In short, Google Reader is like a straight, hard shot of neat news, no ice and no chaser.
Two petitions have been set up at Change.org and KeepGoogleReader.com to implore Google to reverse their decision- we’ve signed them both.
We hope that Google will hastily backtrack on this daft idea, but if all else fails, the cross platform app Feedly has jumped in and offered to replace the much-loved Google service:
Transitioning from Google Reader to feedlyGoogle announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting for some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlesly:
Feedly for iOS
Feedly for Android
Feedly for Chrome
Feedly for Firefox
Feedly for SafariNote 1: if you are migrating from Google Reader to feedly, here are some tips on how to personalize feedly to better match your existing workflows. If you have any feature request please add it on our feature request page.
Note 2: if you are a third party developer using the Google Reader API and would like to integrate with Normandy, please send an email to remi@feedly.com. We would love to keep the Google Reader ecosystem alive.
