I’ve never used Google Reader, but judging by stats here and the cries of horror online upon the announcement of it’s impending July 1st death, quite a few of you do/did. It sucks to lose a service that you’ve come to enjoy and rely on. That much I can relate to. So to hopefully help make the transition a little easier on you, here’s a list of 8 possible alternatives.
The only one listed there that I can personally speak on is Twitter, and my advice is don’t. If you use RSS because you want to make sure that you see things you would miss that might be important, Twitter is absolutely not the way to go. I tried that experiment a while ago and it didn’t work at all. It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t getting the chance to read a lot of things I would have liked to have seen, and once I realized that, it was back to RSS in Thunderbird for me. I like that much better. It archives everything so I can look at it on my own time, plus it’s all searchable so I can find specific things I may have heard about in passing that I want to take a better look at. I’ve got a whole stack of feeds that help me keep up with news and things that might end up here, so if it happened, I probably have it somewhere. Twitter just doesn’t allow for that, even if you’re blind like me and primarily use something like the Qube which saves tweets until you delete them. that sounds good in theory, but with so much happening on Twitter even if you use lists as I do, things pile up quickly and the performance of your entire system suffers the more you let them sit there. As a result, you wind up deleting far more than you actually read, which defeats the entire purpose of Twitter as RSS reader. If you’re only interested in the here and now then by all means give it a go, but otherwise, take my advice and save yourself the trouble.
Good luck, Google Reader orphans. I hope you find something that works for you or that Google reconsiders what seems to me like a very ill advised decision. Feel free to let me know what you’ve decided on and why. I’m always curious about things like that.