As you may have heard, Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1 2013.
We’ve never been fond of Google Reader, mainly for these reasons:
- It’s not free software
- It’s a Google product
- It doesn’t treat feeds equally—updating popular feeds (high subscriber counts) much more frequently than less popular feeds
So, how will this affect our users?
Some time ago, to deal with Google Reader’s selective treatment of feeds, we introduced monitored feeds to subscribers of our premium Full-Text RSS service. This was an experimental feature specifically aimed at Google Reader users. Feeds marked in this way are periodically checked and updates sent to Google Reader using pubsubhubbub.
Seeing as Google Reader will be shutting down, we will soon be removing this feature for new users. Existing users who have set up monitored feeds will receive an email with more information sometime after July 1 2013.
Readable.cc – a very nice news reader
Finally, if you’re looking for a simple, clean news reader, Readable.cc by Elbert Alias looks very nice. It’s free software (GPL) written in PHP, and there’s a hosted version you can sign up for and try out.