Google shreds Reader in new round of 'spring cleaning' Google is killing off Reader, its web-based RSS reading service, as part of its latest round of culling little-used or unprofitable products. A spring clean, if you will. The service will disappear on July 1st, 2013. Google’s reason for the termination, revealed in a blog post, follows: “There are two simple reasons for …
Baffling decision. GR is the best RSS reader out there and the Android App is great too. It saves me so much time and effort, use it for jobs, news sites, all sorts.
Sad. But on the upside Google will own us a bit less and that feels good already.
What RSS reader are we all shifting too ?
I have 350+ feeds and with this, was able to dump mailbox-clogging newsletters while having search access via the web and Android. I don't use Facebook and Twitter, either. This is the way to follow technical blogs, sports updates, etc. Not a complete surprise since they are already pulling the plug on iGoogle, but I am seriously bummed.
I don't use Reader but it's a discontinued product I've actually heard of for a change. And I thought Reader was close to being a standard for RSS so it does seem odd to axe it unless it mysteriously uses a LOT of resources.
Is it a standalone product or integrated with gmail?
My immediate thoughts as well.
When they killed off Exchange Active Sync they told people they're going for open standards and clients should use CalDAV...now they're killing that off as well. Sounds like the walled garden has just added another layer of bricks. Not totally surprising though. They have a habit of open source/standards only when it's convenient.
I'm surprised by the CalDAV thing as well. Given how they were only just shouting recently about how important open standards were to them, as opposed to nasty old Microsoft.
Having just moved from Windows Phone to iPhone, it was interesting to see that GMail is also worse on iPhone without using EAS. I sort of decided then on a project to slowly move away from Google services. As happens I don't use them for calendaring anyway - I just use them for a few things that were convenient. Given how hard to use the UI has become on GMail, I think I might even dump that as my repository of marketing mail and web-sign-ups too.
I wonder how much fuss there would be if Google one day decided to dump Android? Fanciful I admit... But there's no major threat to their search/advertising monopoly, and they make a huge financial loss, so the only big gain is all that lovely location and usage data they gather from all those mobile data-upload stations handsets. Otherwise Android is a defensive move, plus the hope that they can get into content sales through the Play Store. Given the other things Google do, they're in conflict with the Media industry, as much (if not more) than partnership, which will make it hard to win in that space.
Anyway this post has come out a bit more troll-like than I intended, so I'll stop rambling, shut up and hit post.
Indeed. A more cynical soul might point out that the entire and almost immeadiate "outrage" over Reader disappearing might have been an attempt to smokescreen Google yet again ditching a real open standard after only just a few months ago crowing about how important it was that everyone else adopted it.
Reader has been the one constant piece of s/ware that keeps me up to date and feeds me my El Reg daily fix for ages. It was unobtrusive and just worked. While I haven't looked recently, nothing else did what I wanted with so little effort across Desktop, laptop, tablet & phone.
A pox upon the House of Google.
Google Listen worked fine for me, but I also use BeyondPod mainly for the smart playlists.
However, as with many RSS based applications, BeyondPod can also synchronise with Google Reader, allowing it to keep track of listened podcasts across multiple devices (luckily they've currently got a beta of their own synchronisation method in testing).
I'll miss Reader though, the ability to use desktop or mobile to efficiently read feeds (and easily mark certain entries as unread to come back to them later on the other device, if necessary) is/was very useful to me.
Flipboard and Feedly just don't work as well for me.
I tried a lot of them and they're all terrible, but that's mostly because they use the ios design guidelines. Pocket Casts is less terrible now that it's had an almost-holo redesign, and it syncs across devices too. I stuck with Listen for ages because I could listen to podcasts on my laptop through Reader :-)
It's got a very nice built-in RSS reader app. Shame the Register RSS feed only contains the heading and first paragraph of each article though - most other RSS feeds contain the entire article. Don't suppose there's any chance of The Reg improving their feed to contain full articles?
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