I hope Google Readers have July 1st, 2013 circled on their calendars, as it is the end of life (EOL) date for Google’s very popular RSS aggregator.  Here are some considerations and alternatives for migrating your current Google Reader setup.

Considerations

First, you need to make a decision on how you want to move forward with your RSS feeds.  With Google pulling it’s sync servers off-line, most of the RSS readers out there will be forced to stand-up their own servers, or rewrite their programs to force local storage / static RSS scraping.  For me,  I realize that I want to have a program that can function when Google goes off-line (won’t force me to login to use the tool), but has immediate plans to provide a sync solution to their customers.  I very much enjoy having the functionality to “mark as read” my feeds, and have that reflected on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone.  That goes for my flagged / starred posts as well, I want those to travel with me wherever I go.

Alternatives to Google Reader

What does this EOL do to your daily RSS routine?  For me personally, it means that I will be stepping away from a combination of Reeder (Mac), and Mobile RSS (iPad / iPhone).   I will be replacing those two with NetNewsWire.  NewNewsWire is an OSX / iOS enabled App for that does not (at the present time) have a sync service, but provides a powerful tool to organize and categorize feeds from numerous sources.  It is a static RSS aggregator that scrapes the content and delivers it to your program at a user-defined frequency.

My hope with this App, and I’m keeping a close eye on the developers twitter feed, is that NetNewsWire makes good with it’s earlier promises of building sync servers.  If they do, this might be the best replacement for Google Reader as the program is simple but allows for great organizing of feeds into folders and searching off of meta-tags.

Other possible alternatives are : Feedly (browser / mobile based), The Old Reader (web based Google Reader clone), NewsBlur (clunky UI, excellent native sync services not tied to Google), Pulse (sexy front-end but over stylized for content digestion), and lastly NetVibes (nice multifaceted tool suite, but manual migration of feeds makes this a bit heavy for the average user)



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