From the home page, it's just a couple of clicks to the more familiar feed list: The Old Reader makes feed management a bit easier, and in some ways feels more user-friendly than Google Reader. One complaint I've always had about Google Reader is that it can be very difficult to monitor and remove old feeds. In many cases, my "dead" feeds were really feeds which had moved, but the quick reminder makes clean-up easy.
The home page gives you easy access to your categories, a few recent posts, a short list of recently updated feeds, and a list of dead feeds. The Old Reader defaults to a summary screen, like this one: To be fair, The Old Reader does have a unique style and a few usability tweaks, but it is clearly designed for people who want a simpler, less flashy interface for their RSS feeds. The Old Reader attempts to be exactly that – a return to the soon-to-be good-old-days of Google Reader. That uncertainty is the only question mark on an otherwise impressive and easy-to-use offering. Feedly has made it clear that they are building their own data back-end, and hopefully there will be no service interruption. Once the API goes away, it’s unclear how people will migrate. The only reason I marked Feedly down is that currently they connect directly to the Google Reader API. Importing data from Google Reader into Feedly is basically automatic (no export/import required). It appears as an icon in the lower-right, which expands into a full-featured toolbar (I've added the text labels): The Chrome version of Feedly also installs an extension to allow you to easily save or share any page for later. The giant “Mark as read” button may be one of my favorite features of Feedly, and the category-based view will be very familiar to anyone used to Google Reader.
I'm old and easily frightened, so I can be a bit squeamish about too many new features, but it doesn’t take much time at all to figure out Feedly, and it’s easy to default to a more familiar view and dive right into your own feeds: Feedly defaults to a “Today” page, which is pretty handy: I’m using the Chrome version, which has all the bells and whistles. Feedly isn’t technically a web-based app, but it integrates with Chrome and Firefox and has apps for iOS, Android, and Kindle. I almost regret starting with Feedly, because it’s honestly such a good tool that I’m not sure I want to try much else.
RSSOWL UNABLE TO CONNEC UPDATE
If the situation changes, I'll update this section of the post. Unfortunately, Google seems to have made good on their promise – as of July 15, 2013, Google Reader is no longer available for export through Google Takeout. Honorable mention to Digg Reader, which seems to have already fixed some of the shortcomings in my review. I think the best balance in that regard was AOL Reader – it's familiar but fully functional. I decided to declare two winners, because some people wanted something simple and familiar to ease the transition. If you're looking for a full-featured, next-generation reader, Feedly is a great place to start. This post ended up being anti-climactic, because the first reader I used ended up being my favorite. See the list below for quick-links to finished reviews. I’ll be writing the post as I go, updating it every Thursday, so that I can get alternatives into your hands as I test them. So, I’m going to try a new RSS reader each week and write about my experiences here. Like many people, I still use RSS to get information from trusted sources, and I’m looking for alternatives. As you probably know, Google Reader will be shutting down on July 1st. This post is a bit of an experiment, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
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