State of the Art: 3 Ways Feedly Outdoes the Vanishing Google Reader

On July 1, it will take away Google Reader. To the dismay of millions, that service will go the way of Google Answers, Google Buzz, iGoogle and GOOG-411. Google hasn’t provided much in the way of a satisfying reason for this “spring cleaning,” saying only that “usage has declined.”

This column is intended to help two kinds of people: Those who used Google Reader, and those who never even knew what it is.

Google Reader is what’s called, somewhat geekily, a newsreader, or painfully geekily, an RSS aggregator.

It’s like an online newspaper you assemble yourself from Web pages all over the world. Instead of sitting down at your desk each morning and visiting each of your favorites sites in turn — say, NYtimes.com, Reddit.com and HuffingtonPost.com — you just open reader.google.com. There, you find a tidy list of all the new articles from all of those sources, organized like an e-mail Inbox. You skim the headlines, you read summaries, you click the ones that seem worth reading.

Occasionally, you can read the entire article without leaving the newsreader page; that’s up to whoever published the article. Usually, though, you see the headline of each item and a quick description of the article, or maybe the first few paragraphs and an accompanying picture.

One click takes you to the originating Web site. It’s all much faster and more efficient than wading through the ads, the blinking and the less interesting articles on the originating Web sites themselves.

There was a huge outcry when Google announced the imminent death of Reader — petitions, blogs, the works — but you might not immediately understand why. Google Reader is notoriously ugly. It’s fairly complicated and busy.

It is, however, complete, customizable and convenient. And once you’ve set up your preferred sources of reading material, they show up identically on every computer, tablet and phone. The masses may not have used Reader or even heard of it, but information devotees, news hounds and tech followers loved it.

They needn’t mourn. Google Reader has plenty of rivals and satisfying replacements. In fact, I fully intended to offer capsule reviews of each of them, until I realized that six presidential administrations would pass by the time I finished.

Newsreaders are available for every kind of phone, tablet and computer: Bloglines, NewsBlur, Pulse, Taptu, Reeder, FeedDemon, Spundge, Good Noows, HiveMined, Prismatic, Netvibes, NetNewsWire, ManagingNews and so on. Some are Web pages like Google Reader; others are stand-alone programs or apps. Some e-mail programs can subscribe to these feeds, too, dropping them right into your Inbox.

The one everybody keeps saying is the natural heir to Google Reader, though, is Feedly.com. In fact, Feedly says the ranks of its four million users have swelled to seven million since Google’s Reader death sentence was announced.

It requires a free plug-in for the Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers. Three factors in particular make it useful.

First, the biggie: Simply logging into Feedly with your Google name and password instantly re-creates your Google Reader setup. All of your news sources, favorites and tags — category names that you can apply to certain articles, for ease in rounding them up later — magically show up in Feedly, ready to use. The synchronization is two-way; until July 1, you can bounce between Reader and Feedly to your heart’s content, and your newsreader worlds will look identical.

(Behind the scenes, Feedly relies, believe it or not, on Google Reader’s feeds. But the company says it will seamlessly replace Google’s feeds with its own source by July 1.)

Second, Feedly is much nicer-looking than Google Reader. It does a better job with typography — Google does no job at all — the layout is more attractive, and it offers more views of your news.

For example, Feedly can display your feeds exactly the way Google does, in a text-only list; click something in the list to expand and read it right there in the list. But it can also display your articles in much more visual ways. There’s Magazine view (a list of descriptive blurbs, each with a small photo next to it); Cards view (photo and blurb appear on what looks like playing cards filling the screen); and Full Articles view (you don’t have to click to expand anything — each scrolling vertical block shows as much of the article as is available).

Bits Blog: End of Google Reader Sends Internet Into an Uproar

Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

4:43 p.m. | Updated to provide Google comment on why it shut down the service.

Last night, I went to meet a group of friends for dinner in San Francisco after work. As I sat down at the table, two of my dining companions asked in unison, with eye-opening looks on their faces, “Did you hear the news?”

“Yes,” I replied as I shuffled my chair in and unfurled my napkin. “They picked a new pope, from Latin America.”

“No, not that,” they responded. “Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1.” The dinner then turned into a torrent of information about the chaos that had ensued online as a result.

My friends are not the only ones upset by Google’s decision to eliminate Google Reader, the company’s service for viewing blogs through an RSS feed.

People turned to Twitter to lambaste Google for its decision and ask other people for alternative feed readers. Blogs weighed in, noting that the company was making a mistake. A few Web sites that rely on Google Reader for their own products, including FeedDemon, seemed near tears over the decision. And the Hitler meme that usually circulates online during tough times, also appeared with a video about the closing.

Outraged Google Reader fans put together a petition on the Web site Change.org to keep the RSS reader alive, and in a few hours had garnered more than 50,000 signatures.

“It’s still a core part of my Internet use,” wrote Dan Lewis, an avid Google Reader fan, in the petition. “And of the many, many others who are signed below. Our confidence in Google’s other products — Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus — requires that we trust you in respecting how and why we use your other products.”

Some people defended the decision. Dave Winer, one of the people behind the invention of RSS, said good riddance in a blog post on his Web site. But Mr. Winer was an exception as he noted later in the day that his blog post attracted “some pretty sick comments” that he was forced to delete.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Google said it was shutting down the RSS reader because “usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products.” The service has been the leading RSS reader for some time, and users seem to be upset that there are few RSS competitors, although there are newer types of news-aggregating products like Flipboard and Pulse. One theory is that Google is trying to push customers to Google Plus, its social-networking site, where users can track product pages for different news outlets.

Now people will be out on the news reader street by July 1, and there are few places for them to go.

As BuzzFeed noted, using data from the BuzzFeed Network, a group of sites that collectively have over 300 million users,Google Reader still sends a considerable amount of traffic to these sites. Google Plus, the company’s social network, does not.

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post incorrectly said that Google declined to comment on why it shut down the service.