A lot of people were upset by yesterday’s surprise announcement of Google Reader’s imminent demise. In response, Zite spent a few hours making some changes to incorporate your Google Reader feeds into their apps – that doesn’t rely on Google’s infrastructure. Zite is an app available for mobile devices – Android, iPhone/iPad, and WP7. It scours the web looking for articles in a multitude of fields and interests and uses the results to create a “magazine” with stories of interest to you. In their own words: “Zite evaluates millions of new stories every day, looking at the type of article, its key attributes and how it is shared across the web. Zite uses this information to match stories to your personal interests and then delivers them automatically to your” mobile device. It seems Google Reader was always a part of Zite; you were able to link your Google Reader account to Zite, but those articles wouldn’t have their own, separate category.
Now, you can have a separate category just for your Google Reader feeds in Zite’s Quicklist. It’s quick and easy to add; just visit Zite’s Blog to learn how to get it set up. Zite is free, and it’s available in the Apple App Store (universal app), in Google Play, and in the Windows Phone store. Because of their quick conversion efforts, Zite is aware of some limitations for this new feed. At the moment, it’s a basic feed reader, but they are working to add functionality even as you read this. Zite says they are eager to add features that you and the other displaced Google Readers want and need. They have an email (found in the blog entry) where you can send your ideas of what you need in a reader.
Go read the blog entry and get started!
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I think that the reason people liked Google reader is misunderstood. I’ve spent the last few hours looking for alternatives and none of them do what I want – which is a simple list which I can control-click and open a new tab for the article. I don’t want pictures, animation, pop-ups, magazine style or anything other than a list of sources, a list of articles and a “mark as read” button – i.e. just what Google has. The first developer that gives me this will get a payment from me.
I’ve looked at a few readers in the last few hours:
Feedly – can’t sort feeds or hide read articles.
NewsBlur – opens new tab in front of reader.
Bamboo – no way to open in new tab behind.
Vienna – very good but standalone therefore no AdBlock
RSSOwl – needs Java
NetNewswire – No tabbed browsing. No AdBlock
Brief – the best of the bunch so far – but not as good as Google. Feeds seem sort randomly.
Newsitter – rubbish. Locked up almost instantly.
My point is that all the readers I’ve looked at so far seem to focus on appearance, photos, pop-ups and features that I don’t want when I’m snatching a quick coffee. I want to put the kettle on, half a dozen sites while the water boils, go and make the coffee and then come back and read the articles.
Given that Google is not continuing Reader I have to accept that I’m in a minority and can’t bitch too much about stuff that’s free not doing *exactly* what I want. I’d pay to use Google reader.
I second what Izzy said. Anything with pictures and paragraphs is out immediately. The idea behind RSS is a headline, a summary, and a website link – accessed sequentially as needed. Ideally, it should also store old articles for later search and retrieval. Google Reader was perfect.