Google just discontinued its RSS reader today – RIP Google Reader.
They launched Google Reader on October 7, 2005. I discovered and started using it to read feeds since October 30, 2006 just after a set of new features were implemented.
The impact it had on how I discovered, curated and consumed data has been phenomenal. In 6 years, 8 months, I read close to 166k posts. That’s a whopping 68 articles, posts, blogs & pictures that I viewed everyday! The following stats just summarize, my reading patterns. I have about 90 pages, out of which 88 are active, that I regularly follow using their feeds not to mention the occasional use of Reader Play.
- Blogs 21
- Facebook Feed 1
- Twitter Feed 7
- Finance 7
- Google Related 19
- Marketing 6
- Photography 9
- Tech Stuff 16
- ‘Toons 4
A few more statistics that I could get out from the backup that Google Takeout provided. I would have loved to see these trends over a longer period of time.
- 20 people were following my reader shares and I was following 12 people.
- I starred 16, liked 89, made notes on 234 articles and shared 775 articles.
- My followers shared 5311 articles.
Mihai Parparita wrote some Python scripts that download everything from your Google Reader accounts, including the entire content of the posts from your subscriptions.
A couple of days back, I moved to Feedly Cloud as well as Hivereader which are neat alternative to Reader and giving both a spin simultaneously. Feedly seems to be the most popular reader that people are switching to right now and serves my purpose well. Doesn’t show any reading statistics or have RSS sharing features as of now (shares via Buffer). Hive looks rudimentary as compared to Feedly but has a direct share and follow features.
Hopefully both will have more features added soon.
And by the way, Mihai, who spent 5 years working on Google reader, recommends NewsBlur and Digg Reader as good alternatives to reader.
.Before I sign out, here is a nice interview of Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS (transcript) at PBS.
