Yesterday, as many of you may be aware, Google informed the world they would be shutting down Google Reader. I don’t know about the bulk of you, but I use it extensively on the desktop – nearly living in it throughout the day. I’ve spent a long time culling my RSS feeds and their organization.
For mobile I’ve been using Flipboard and Reeder – but for the desktop Google Reader. Now with that going away in July, I was looking for a replacement. A lot of comments and articles that followed the news led me to check out Feedly. I first installed it on my iPhone and logged into my Google Reader account with it. Looks good enough for me. I then installed the Feedly Safari extension – and it’s pretty great!
One thing I was reading was people liked the spartan UI of Google Reader and how everything was presented in a long list of stuff you wouldn’t need to page through. I have to agree. If there were hundreds of items displayed, I could simply scroll down through them, picking which I wanted to actually read.
If you go to the Latest or Today view using the extension, you get that kind of UI. Which I like a lot.
It will still take a little while to get used to consuming the feeds using Feedly, but so far it looks like the best replacement for me. And when GR goes away, Feedly promises that their backend will pick up the ball and run with it without you even knowing about it. Project Normandy.
We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.
There you have it. Kick the tires and see what you think – Chrome, Safari, iOS, Android, all covered.