Google Reader - Gone Before Your Time

I love RSS, a technology that brings content to me so I don't have to remember to visit hundreds of sites to see if they happen to have new posts. Google Reader made RSS work for me, it kept track of if I had viewed content much like an email client. It allowed me to use it from any number of the computers I happened to use that day.  In any given week I use Google Reader more than ANY other web service I use.

When I got the news that reader is going away, my first reaction was the world was going to end.  How could Google take away such a beloved service? I took a little time to debate things and come to realize that reader is just a content consumption platform.  Google Reader did what I needed it to do, but it itself had nothing to do with the content. Switching from Google Reader to another platform would be comparable to switching from one media player to another, you still could watch the same video.

Going with the idea that its just a platform, means there can easily be other platforms that can do the same thing, maybe even better.  I found two of them I want to test out and see how they work.  The first one I found was The Old Reader, but looks like it might work and similar to reader of past years, not sure about Android support.  The second one that seems interesting is NewsBlur.  NewsBlur seems fairly modern and has an Android app so it might win out in the end if I don't come across anything else.

In the end I'm still sad, but I'm willing to move one to a new platform.  Switching to new platforms is just something that happens from time to time in the computer world.  Maybe in the process I might come across something even better than Google Reader.