More about timing.

Here’s the thing; while the writing was on the wall, most people didn’t expect Google to ditch Reader 5 months from “now.” Now is now 4 months and three weeks on the proverbial rearview mirror. This means two things.

First, people who already run their own RSS clients and what not–Google Reader was great, but it didn’t do some things well, such as update on time. There are the tin-foil-hat guys who run their own RSS servers (or maybe they’re just super min-maxing nerds). There are also a variety of different companies serving the existing gap that GReader didn’t reach across, which is namely anything in the mobile space. Of course, there is the guys at The Old Reader who loves GRSI, like I do, that Goog axed unceremoniously. I still resent them for it today, to be perfectly honest.

Second, people who always wanted their own RSS clients but couldn’t launch because Google Reader was the de facto market king. It probably had 50%+ market share, and in the rare event that one of these 3rd party clients had a better UX and better feature set than GR, Google’s brand power and marketing meant these small guys had no chance in hell. Most of the time tho they didn’t have a better UX and/or better features–partly because there was little market opportunity, little incentives, to improve.

So when Google decided to shut Reader, the two groups of people sprang into action. Existing services had to scale to take in the refugees, and the second group now have incentive to play the game. This also means back in March, the landscape of your GR alternatives is very different than in mid June.

For one, Feedly Cloud now exists. And that’s what I’m moving to.

The Old Reader had bee my target of choice but I never really like it that much. Part of it had to do with performance, since it was reallllyyy swamped. Now it’s much better. Difference here being that Feedly does already support devices (although I use feed readers on my mobile devices like, one out of 300 days or something), and it sports a much better user experience (including additional views like the card one that I use for the image-heavy feeds). Feedly also doesn’t support all my feeds (Mandarake … fire hose feed doesn’t even load, but I can use figinstock if I had to), while TOR supports, well, GRSI-type deal. After a quick survey on twitter, more than half of my followers who responded went the way of Feedly anyway, so it is not a huge loss.

The funny thing is like, almost every guide about “life after Google Reader” fail to take into account this gap of 4.5 months or so, the development time for new jazz. Like the Digg reader (which looks like POS) and the AOL Reader (which might be slightly closer to what I’m looking for). Or the new Feedly Cloud reader.

Anyway, it’s not really time to worry about what works. It’s time to see what I can salvage from Google Reader in its final week. Farewell, friend and companion on the web!