Goodbye, Google Reader… Hello, The Old Reader?
As announced back in March, Google Reader was shut down today. According to the message currently displayed when attempting to access the service, which also links to a list of alternatives, users who haven’t done so already will still be able to use Google Takeout to download a copy of their Google Reader data, likely to import into their new RSS reader of choice, until 12 PM PST on July 15. After that time, everything will be deleted.
From what I’m seeing, the vast majority of Google Reader users have now switched to Feedly, with the rest, myself included, spreading among a large number of other services, though it’ll remain to be seen how the new Digg Reader will change that situation over the coming weeks and months. Understandably, those services will currently be experiencing levels of traffic that they may not be equipped to handle just yet, which will probably be most noticeable for the smaller ones, while the newly launched ones are still likely to be struggling with bugs or features that aren’t yet implemented, so this is far from the best time to test them if you haven’t done so already, but things should get better in time, in part perhaps also because the traffic levels will be somewhat lower once those who have made accounts on multiple such services will make their final choice.
Seeing as I haven’t tested any except The Old Reader, which was the one I chose after going through a few articles comparing the options shortly after the initial announcement, I’m afraid I can’t help you compare if you’re still looking for another reader, but can point out that a bug in The Old Reader currently makes the page scroll to the clicked post regardless of the settings and one obvious thing that it lacks compared to Google Reader is the ability to manually refresh all feeds at once.
Admittedly, as their server status page reports, the spike in traffic is seriously straining their servers and everything is running significantly slower than it should at the moment, manual refresh commands possibly failing even on single feeds, so such an option couldn’t work at the moment even if it would exist, but perhaps things will improve with time. It is, after all, a small project maintained by a few people in their spare time, and partially with their own money, seeing as donations don’t cover the costs, and they were only reporting some 260000 users three weeks ago.
Of course, the first thing I looked for was a simple interface without too many features I won’t use getting in the way and with a look that won’t make me think it was designed with mobile devices in mind, but the fact that it is an independent project maintained by people you can definitely see as volunteers clearly weighed a lot in my decision to pick it back then as well. Unfortunately, this does make such problems far more likely and also greatly increases the risk of the whole thing eventually needing to be discontinued, so I’ll wait and see what happens, but do plan to stick with it if it won’t get worse.
