It occurred to me while I was researching what I was going to use to replace Google Reader that there were more replacements out there now than when they first announced that they were closing reader down. That seems a pretty shrewd way to prove that you are not monopolistic. Develop a service that’s already out there to such a point that a majority of people are using it. Then close it down and let free enterprise offer replacements. Everyone developing replacements has a pretty good idea of what Google was doing and I could be wrong but I think that the code was open source. So how is it that all the replacements that I’ve tried are so bad. Some of them come close. But then they want to be able to offer you more crap based on your profile. Or they want more information about you so they can connect you to more people. Why must I be so … social to use a social network tool?
At any rate, I’ve come to a compromise by taking the few social blogs that I follow and incorporating them into my blog through a minimum of programming. I’ve added ‘SimplePie’, ‘RSS Aggregator’, and ‘Hungryfeed’ ‘RSS Multi-Importer’. That lets me put up two pages columns on an RSS page. One, an RSS Timeline of entries. And the other, incorporates the last three entries from each blog. Even though I don’t have the ability to see the photos from the photo blogs, I think that it’s a pretty fair compromise.
We’re in agreement that most of the replacement readers are “so bad”. Most of them are too feature-heavy for me. I just want a feed reader.
Before Google Reader, I used a separate application (outside the browser) for reading RSS feeds. I may go back to that if any of those apps still exist for the desktop computer.
(Currently using “The Old Reader”; it’s not terrible.)