Five years after Google conquered and abandoned RSS, the news-reader ecosystem is showing green shoots

+1 on that. I’ve been happy with Thunderbird for RSS since about '04, never understood what all the hubbub was about, google killing rss and all that. I must be missing out on something.

Another +1. Email remains the killer app of all time, imo.

7 Likes

You could publish it as a freely available AMI image, making it easier for others to use.

Another Feedly user here, ever since Google pulled Reader out from under everyone. I highly recommend it.

4 Likes

Am I just an old man yelling at kids on my lawn; or is it weird how none of the options mentioned are just programs you run on your computer, rather than subscriptions of varying cost and benevolence where you really on a 3rd party to digest your RSS and feed you links?

I’m still rather baffled as to why Google chose to throw away their dominance in this area(especially when “just drift off to Facebook” was a likely trajectory for their former users); but I’m alarmed by how effective they seem to have been in shifting the tone of the genre from client software to as-a-service-and-I-am-altering-the-deal.

Given that handling untrustworthy inputs isn’t safe, RSS clients can’t be used indefinitely without some sort of support (though they can shove the most dangerous part of the job onto your browser, which helps); but they are substantially less vulnerable to termination and/or pricing model fuckery.

6 Likes

Somewhat surprised nobody is using Selfoss (“The new multipurpose rss reader, live stream, mashup, aggregation web application”) like I am on my Rasberry Pi. But I realise I’m a geek.

1 Like

Feedly user ever since they shut down Google Reader. It’s not that I won’t gladly try something else from time to time, but for heaven’s sake all the alternatives are horrible. I don’t want an algorithm telling me what I want to read. I know what I want to read, I just need to know when it updates.

Google’s steadily getting worse at everything. YouTube will fight you if you want to follow certain channels and ignore everything else. I await the day they just remove the ‘subscribe’ button altogether.

8 Likes

As I see it, the one advantage of using a third-party service is that you can access it from multiple locations and devices without duplication. If you’re always using using the same computer, then Thunderbird or an RSS-specific desktop application makes more sense.

Speaking of Google shutting stuff down…

2 Likes

Nuts. I use google links to coordinate tennis matches and the checkbox to shorten google map links was very convenient. I can use an external service but thats just one more thing to go wrong.

I move between laptop, wife’s laptop, desktop and phone, so a service is a huge value-add for me.

In Firefox, there’s an extension called Feedbro. It doesn’t seem to have any restrictions, and you can set up rules.

Before I discovered that, I used Netvibes. There’s a paid option with that too, but I haven’t run into any issues with the unpaid.

1 Like

By killer app, do you mean ‘makes me want to kill myself’?

If yes, I agree.

If no, then pox on ye and thy kin

I’d be OK with burning down all the URL shorteners; but what makes me nervous is what they propose as a replacement.

Oh, yeah, let’s embed the much loved “You are on our website, would you like to download our shoddy little app?” nag into our dystopian reinvention of URLs.

It’s tragic that there’s no way to burn down an idea and sow its fields with salt and/or cobalt-60 to prevent it being rebuilt.

5 Likes

I’m sure that they’ll be shocked, shocked when someone uses it to drop users onto the dayzero-malware store, install (y/n)?

4 Likes

I initially switched to Feedly after the Google Incident, but then moved to Feedbin. I don’t remember why now but I’ve been happy with it in Reeder on Mac and iPad.

Some sites are impervious to the “show full page” scraping that Reeder does, but that’s always going to be an arms race between sites/advertisers and clients.

2 Likes

Yes! Local running apps for the win!

I had been using NetNewsWire (3) on OSX for years, the free and barely-ad-supported version, but it started showing its age and refused to sync certain feed formats (like BoingBoing’s). Switched to Feedly and was quite satisfied, but I don’t like the service based approach. Also missing the keyboard shortcuts of NNW.

Then I started typing this reply and thought I might want to check my sources and lo, there’s a new version of NetNewsWire that seems future-proofed! Might also have been there for ages and my spoiled ass thinking the old one was checking for updates for me. Back on the good path!

The only downside of a local app might be that if, like me, you just open it once a day or so, it can miss out on the more volatile types of feeds (like forum feeds), not catching every post before the rss server deletes them, but that’s hardly a problem.

Hoping their free version (I’m on a fresh trial now) just turns into ad-support again. Otherwise, I’d rather just buy a local ap for a $20 for my RSS addiction than think about some ugly service subscription.

Rejoice!

3 Likes

I’m so convinced there’s room for a best-of-both-worlds solution that I’m nigh-certain that someone already thought of it and started developing it. That’s typically the kind of thing Mozilla would have been all over in the past. There wouldn’t be a lot of stuff to sync across various clients, after all, and it could work with a clever use of existing standard technologies.

But I’m too lazy to look it up, so I’ll stick with Thunderbird for now.

Sorry for the frustration, Feedly Pro users keep the development and infrastructure of Feedly going on in the long-run, we’re fully bootstrapped. Benefits are that we’re listening to customers what they want and can deliver it as well. Ads help fund the development too and for those who don’t like them there is always the ad-free Feedly Pro.

3 Likes

http://offog.org/code/rawdog

Append your feed URL’s to the config file, output is HTML with summaries and links in it.

1 Like

And there still isn’t.

(I use The Old Reader and Feeddler on my phone.)

1 Like