Angry Robot

Super Feedpocalypse

As I mentioned in the links, Google Reader is being “retired”.

(Aside: I love retired and “sunsetted”, but at some point could we also try “horse doctored”, “old dogged”, and “behind barned”?)

Perhaps there aren’t that many of us any more who rely on feeds. I understand the twitter and that other, blue-thumbed, oversharing service are often used to “curate” and “discover” links to web sites. But I’m guessing there are a few million of us diehards still, all thinking over our options right now.

Option one for me is to try using Fever again. Pluses: it syncs with Reeder, and I already bought it. Minuses: it’s probably not for you unless you’re in the habit of installing software on servers.

Option two appears to be Feedly, which has built a clone of the Google Reader API, which theoretically means that all the apps that used GReader as a back end could easily switch to Feedly. However: the developers of said apps would have to do that first. Also, Feedly looks like another free service with no apparent business model, which I’m guessing means ads or data mining at some point. That or a sudden shutdown.

There are some more options and thoughts here. I agree that it’s a good thing for the category; Google basically did a Microsoft Internet Explorer with the feed reading market, wrecking anyone’s chance of making money by being huge and free. Let’s hope that readers find new options and are willing to pay some money to create some sustainable businesses.

Anyway, given this news, I suggest we bloggists start to get worried about Feedburner, another critical piece of infrastructure that is free, niche, owned by Google, and hasn’t seen an update in ages.