Saying Goodbye to Google Reader and Choosing a Replacement

google-reader-closedGoogle is retiring the excellent RSS reading tool, Google Reader today. There’s been a lot of news about this impending… event? disaster? non-event? For those who love using really simple syndicated (that’s RSS btw) news feeds from all over in one place, there are a number of replacements. More on that later.

But first, if you use Google Reader and you haven’t yet exported your news list, you’ve been ignoring that popup to backup your data for quite awhile now. So don’t ignore it any longer. Just go to Google Takeout and export your Google Reader data to a file. You can then use that file to setup a replacement RSS reader of your choice. If you wait any longer, you won’t be able to do this.

As to a replacement (and also free) RSS reader, here’s my short list:

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  • Digg Reader (has a handy infinite scroller, fast and easy to move to)
  • Feedly (a quick and easy place to move to, but not quite as well-featured)
  • Curata Reader (very clean, great for busy people)
  • Reeder (for iPhone, hooks into Feedly, I like this one a lot!)

zitePersonally, I want things easy, so rather than hunt down the RSS feeds for everything, I use Zite on my iPad, and just choose sources from what they offer, iOS users get it here. It’s now also available for Android and Amazon here. For those few feeds that I follow and aren’t in Zite, well that’s what bookmarks/favorites are for!

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