Post-Google Reader World Not As Useful

I’ve been using Fever for about a week now, and it’s been challenging. I’ve got it all set up and auto-syncing, but it’s just more clunky than Google Reader ever was. I don’t trust it; I feel like I’m missing articles from important feeds. My use is dropping off, and I’m looking for alternatives.

It’s frustrating to have lost a key element of my workflow. I’m using Twitter more, but it’s not a direct substitute. There’s a void in my information discovery mechanisms now, and I have no idea what – if anything – will replace it.

I think the demise of Google Reader is going to have a bigger impact than we know. Unfortunately, much of it will probably go away silently. We’ll just slowly get used to not having as much information flow as before. Some of our favorite sites will lose unknown quantities of readership, and maybe disappear because of it.

Google has also lost (more of) my trust. Even if they reinstate the service, I likely won’t go back to using it. And I certainly won’t move to something like Google+ to replace it. In the big scheme of things, I – a single user – certainly doesn’t matter that much. I wonder how many others are out there like me. En mass, do we make a difference? Can we even know?

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1 Response to Post-Google Reader World Not As Useful

  1. I’m disappointed with the loss of Google Reader as well. I had started using an Android app called Press a few months ago, and they have now stated that they will be working with some of the other big RSS readers (Reeder, Feedly, etc) to come up with a common server back-end that all of these services can share, much in the way they all relied on Google Reader.

    That said, I’m also using Prismatic, and it’s been doing a good job of showing me stories outside of my usual feeds, but have been very relevant and useful. It’s more of a topic-based model, where you would enter a term such as “Apple”, and it aggregates the information. Much like a Google News Alert would, but in real-time. My ideal news reader client would do a mix of both, as there are specific feeds I want to follow, but enjoy seeing relevant content from outside my mix of readers.

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