Have you been acting like Scarlett O’Hara when it comes to the impending Google Reader shutdown? “I’ll think about that tomorrow… Tomorrow is another day.” Well, there are only a couple of tomorrows left; and if you’ve sworn, as God as your witness, you’ll never go hungry for RSS feeds again, you’d better get a move on.
The issue raised by Google’s decision to drop Reader isn’t with reading, it’s with syncing. Most of us read our RSS feeds on more than one device and we want a syncing service that allows us to pick up on our iPhones where we left off on our laptops. There were a few non-Google syncing options before Google’s announcement in March and more have arisen to fill the void since then. How do you decide which one to go with?
My answer was for the most part “none of the above.” When Google made this announcement, rather than wait until the last minute, I decided to deal with it early and be done with it. Rather than find a replacement feed reader, I decided to see if I could just kill off RSS feeds altogether.
I came close. I found, when I looked at it, that about half the things I had in my RSS feed I also had sitting in my Twitter stream, and I was effectively seeing the same content in both places. Easy decision; the RSS feeds got whacked.
With everything that was left, I first asked “do I want this?” and “when was the last time I got something interesting/useful off this feed?” and “why did I subscribe in the first place?” — and if I couldn’t answer the questions, I nuked it. A lot of stuff was in there because at one point, one article caught my eye forwarded from someone, and I put it in my feeds to see if more interesting articles followed it. Not surprisingly, lots of the time, that didn’t happen, but I was too lazy to set up an “under evaluation” process where I weeded them back out later. So I did it as part of this migration.
If the feed passed that test, I then looked for where I could land it: Do they stick it in twitter? (much of the time, yes). Is it tumblr? G+? Facebook? Do they show up in my Prismatic feed?
When I was done, I ended up with 23 feeds that I felt I could only read via RSS. For those, I set up a Feedly account and stuck them in, turned off Google Reader, and haven’t touched it since. Of those 23 feeds (now 17, as I decided I could live without a few when they weren’t part of a large firehose of articles…). Feedly works fine. I like it, I don’t love it. It has its quirks, they keep working on improving it, and I feel no need to find a different service. That said, I’m only spending about 5 minutes a day in it now, and at least five of those feeds I could get in Prismatic now, too, but things are comfortable this way.
I spent maybe four hours making these changes. As a result, I’m spending about 30-40 minutes a day LESS trying to keep up with the firehose, and not only do I not feel like I’m missing anything, I feel like I’m actually seeing the most interesting stuff more easily.
So my suggestion: don’t just find a place to dump your google reader feed and keep doing it the old way. Spend a little time, rethink what you’re doing, and use this as a reason to invest and upgrade who you manage this firehose of data.
My other suggestion: If you run a blog or web site that does NOT have content announcements posted onto Twitter, you are an IDIOT. Just saying. And if you (like me) are someone who tends to be a chatter mouth on Twitter, it’s trivially easy to set up a second twitter feed JUST for site content for people who don’t want the noise. And it works…
The internet has moved on from Google Reader. Don’t stick yourself in the Black and White TV days of managing your content by simply replacing your old Google Reader with some “new” clone. A bit of time invested here thinking and tweaking may well save you that second cup of coffee you’re needing just to wade through all of this. It did for me… (and then you can use that second cup of coffee on other things!)
(Also see Marco’s comments on this)