The Official Google Blog has announced that Google Reader will be retired on July 1, 2013 due to their policy of diverting energy into fewer products and the fact that the use of RSS feeds is in decline.
Oh crap.
Usually when Google kills a product, it is replaced by something better such as when Google Documents was supplanted by Google Drive (which, btw, is one of my favorite Google products). Unfortunately there is no Google replacement for Reader because RSS is thought be be declining to an inevitable end.
Oh crap.
I gather almost all 100% of my news from sources that are fed into Google Reader. I do not have the time or energy to surf through all the different sites that I enjoy so Reader has been a godsend. I also catch up on my preferred blogs through RSS so this is a double burn.
I have signed a petition begging Google to keep Reader. You can also tweet to BringGoogleReaderBack. In the meantime I have downloaded my subscription though Google Takeout so that I will be able to import them into another RSS feed program if Google really does follow through and break my heart.
So far the best options for Reader replacement have been Feedly, NewsBlur and The Old Reader, but none of them is quite as good. Another option is to give up on RSS and use something else like Twitter. My problem is that Twitter is much more prolific and the content is different because of its social media bend.
Readers and fellow bloggers, how are you gathering your news and blogs? Is there something better out there?
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