There have been tons of posts regarding alternative RSS readers on HN lately, but most of them do not quite get what made Google Reader special.
There have always been other RSS readers, but Google Reader synchronized your feeds between machines. One could read their feeds between work/home/mobile/tablet and have a consistent view on what is read/unread and organized exactly how you want it.
It is not the reader, it is the service behind the reader.
Hi, I'm the developer of newsbeuter. I absolutely agree with your last sentence in that's what many users expect from an RSS reader. That's why newsbeuter supports Google Reader and TinyTinyRSS as services, and soon will support Feedly as soon as I can get access to a test system for their Google-Reader-compatible API (aka "Normandy"); support for other services will follow.
I value my privacy too much to use a web app that makes my data available to someone else.
I don't trust Google or anyone else to know my reading history. It's none of their damn business. I don't want them spying on me, even if it would make it more convenient for me to sync my feeds across machines.
If more people valued their privacy enough to do something about it, maybe we wouldn't be moving ever closer to a total surveillance state.
I'm happy Google Reader is gone, and I hope more web apps follow their example.
This. I'm kind of dumbfounded by the number of tech "pundits" claiming that app X is a good replacement.
* I use Newsbeuter myself but even then it syncs with Reader. I use the web view, I use GUIs.
* I aggregate business client feeds using reader. I pull them into both third party shared workspace services and my various RSS capable applications. State syncs so I know what I've reviewed on my phone vs desktop. SUCH a timesaver.
* I aggregate systems alerts using Reader. I then review them on my phone and my desktop via a GUI notifier pulling in that feed. Read state per item syncs.
* I sync my podcast app so that I can bring up the web view in Reader of any given feed and fresh content is there, read/listen state synchronized with my mobile client.
Sync. Decent web view. Good enough sorting options. Aggregated views based on folders & subfolders. All unique enough that this shutdown will seriously impact my daily workflow, and no "app X" is going to replace it. For now.
One big disadvantage of all RSS readers us that they do not have an accumulated history of items that are not in the current feed files. If I find an interesting blog, in the reader I am limited to 10 or 20 entries in the current feed. Whereas in Google Reader I can click through all items accumulated through the years.
I just installed Tiny Tiny RSS -- www.tt-rss.org -- which is entirely web based and multiclient. Like GR, you can access it from where ever you have a browser and get a synchronized view.
And that's why reading rss is your emailer is so great, because presumably you already have a system to to synchronize your email reading from multiple places. I get news sent to me via rss2email and I read it using my phone, my laptop, and my desktop.
For a long time, I was looking for a reader that allows to export not only the subscriptions, but the actual news archive. With newsbeuter I can easily access the sqlite database and export all the news.
I tried newsbeuter once before. I prefer CLI programs for most things, but enough feeds I follow depend on pictures (ok, maybe just xkcd) that it wasn't worth it.
You can hook it up to urlview to open links or the original article (as long you're running it locally, not in a remote screen), however - that was a nice touch.
There have always been other RSS readers, but Google Reader synchronized your feeds between machines. One could read their feeds between work/home/mobile/tablet and have a consistent view on what is read/unread and organized exactly how you want it.
It is not the reader, it is the service behind the reader.