I’ve never really gotten over the hurt. I’m stuck in that murky ground between steps three and four of the Five Stages of Loss and Grief. I’ve tried to move on but I’m starting to think nothing can ever take your place. Sure, some have tried to fill the huge void left after you were so cruelly put down but sadly, and despite potential, most have come up short. I miss you dearly Google Reader.
What?!?! I take my RSS subscription and news aggregation seriously. Doesn’t everybody?
When Google pulled the plug on its Reader service Feedly immediately stepped up its game by upgrading their servers and making the transition from the Big G simple and painless. The goal was for Feedly to position itself as the biggest and best news reader in all the land. They succeeded quite well and emerged as the defacto standard for RSS readers. It was a heady few months and I honestly felt I could finally find happiness. Then things got weird.
The decision makers at Feedly introduced a very expensive “pro” product that stripped functionality from the service and essentially made some aspects pay-for-play. Team Feedly followed that up with a very sudden transition from Google OAuth logins to Google+ only logins that prevented users without Google+ logons from using the service. They wisely reversed that decision but the pièce de résistance came next. Feedly began hijacking their users links.
Content that users were linking to and assumed would lead to the original source was now hosted on Feedly’s own servers. Uncool and heavy, to say the least. Not surprising they felt it was prudent to role this “feature” back as well. For me it was three strikes, take a seat for Feedly.
On this week’s 75th episode SPECTACULAR I run down my alternatives to Feedly now that they’ve so thoroughly nuked the fridge and successfully jumped the shark. The top contenders include work-in-progress efforts from AOL and Digg plus offerings from smaller companies like Inoreader and The Old Reader.
Take a listen and find out which RSS aggregator gets the nod from El Kaiser.
