New York: On 1 July, we say goodbye to Google
Reader, a handy tool for bringing headlines and articles from your
favourite websites into a single place.
With Reader, I’ve been able to see at a glance all the updates from
various news services, blogs and company websites I follow. Although
many of these items relate to work, I have added a few fun topics, too,
including news on Antarctica and a daily dose of passive aggressive
notes that people send each other.
I have spent a lot of time curating Reader, so I’m not keen on seeing it die.
Fortunately, there’s an afterlife. Google has made it easy to move
your list of sites you follow, known as feeds, to another service. And
many of those rival services have made it easy to accept those feeds,
especially after Google said in March that it would retire Reader.
Reader’s demise comes as little surprise. Google says usage has declined since Reader made its debut in 2005.
RSS feeds – for really simple syndication – used to be a popular way
to keep track of multiple websites without having to visit each and
every one. Content comes to you, through readers such as Google Reader.
More recently, though, Twitter and Facebook have performed a similar
role in discovering content. I myself have logged on to Reader less
frequently because keeping up with more than 150 feeds from dozens of
sites became overwhelming.
Yet I still check it now and then for a glimpse of what’s out there.
As July 1 approached, I looked at a half-dozen alternative services.
All of them are free, like Reader. It didn’t take long to find one that
exceeds what Reader offers in many ways, though a few omissions will
leave me missing Google’s offering.
The service that stands out is Feedly. An update available Wednesday
allows Feedly to run on just about any major Web browser. The service
also is available through apps on the iPhone, the iPad and Android
devices.
Transferring your feeds from Reader is easy.
Most other services require you to create a data file of those feeds
using a Google tool called Takeout. It’s fairly straightforward, but you
then have to save the file to your computer and import that to the
service. In one case, only one of the more than 150 feeds survived the
transfer because of some glitch.
With Feedly, you can skip that step. Simply log in with your Google
account, and all that gets done automatically. There’s also no need to
create and remember a separate Feedly account. You use your Google
credentials each time you’re back.
On Reader, I have my feeds organised by category into folders. Those
categories remain intact on Feedly, though they appear alphabetical
rather than topical, as I had arranged them on Reader. It isn’t too
difficult to reorder them.
Feedly excels in highlighting the most popular items from all your
feeds, based on sharing and other interactions on Feedly and elsewhere.
Simply visit a page called “Today.” Under the default layout, you see
headlines and the first sentence or two of each item. You can click on
any item for more.
You can also share the item on a number of social networking sites. That
freedom isn’t available on Reader, which confines sharing to Google’s
own Plus service.
My four main complaints with Feedly:
• You can save a link to read later, but it would have been better had
Feedly fetched those items as well so you can read them offline.
• Although the service lets you email items to others, you have to go
through stand-alone software such as Outlook, which is often tied to
your work account. By contrast, Reader lets you email over the Web using
Google’s own Gmail service.
• With Reader, items are automatically marked as read as I scroll
down, so that they won’t reappear the next time. Feedly does that, too,
in a non-default layout that most resembles Reader’s. That part is good.
But while Feedly offers additional layout options, it doesn’t take full
advantage of its greater breadth. It would have been nice to have
auto-marking when scrolling in those layouts as well.
• Many websites let you easily add their feeds by clicking on a
button. Reader is usually among the options, but Feedly isn’t yet.
Instead, you must copy and paste the Web address for the feed into
Feedly. But Feedly is better than Reader at suggesting feeds to add, if
you don’t have specific ones in mind for a given topic.
I did try one other service that makes it as easy as Feedly to
transfer feeds from Reader and discover new ones. But that service,
called Pulse, does require you to set up a separate Pulse account or use
Facebook’s – not Google’s. If you can get past that added hassle, Pulse
does the rest of the work for you once you log in to your Google
account. There’s no Google data file to create, save and import.
Unfortunately, articles are presented as tiles, similar to what you
see in Microsoft’s oft-criticized Windows 8 operating system. That works
fine when you’re choosing apps on a tablet computer. On desktop and
laptop computers, I find a list much easier to read and scroll through. I
had a backlog of more than 20,000 articles, and I wasn’t about to click
on 20,000 squares.
There are dozens of other services I didn’t get a chance to try. Some
of them are more geared toward mobile devices. Others are still in
development. For example, a popular site called Digg promises one on
June 26, just five days before Reader’s cutoff.
I’m sure there’s one out there that matches or exceeds what Feedly offers, but I saw no need to look further.
Feedly has tripled its user base to 12 million since Google announced
Reader’s retirement. The growth has given Feedly incentive to work on
new features. Feedly has also designed the system so that outside
developers can build apps for it. You can use one to run Feedly on
BlackBerry phones, for instance.
Feedly isn’t perfect, but switching to it will make Reader’s demise easier to accept.
Associated Press
Source: http://to.ly/mblV
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Google Reader dies today. Why Feedly is the best replacement
Written By Unknown on July 1, 2013 | 7/01/2013
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Sci & Tech