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Comment by adkadskhj | Hacker News Reader

I didn't use Google Reader much, what did it do for you that made it memorable? Or perhaps, what are other Readers failing to deliver?

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For me, it wasn't so much Google Reader itself, it was a free feed sync source.

So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a 3rd party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view the feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the tracking and syncing so to speak.

It fills the gap of services like Feedbin, Feedly, and others. Except it was "free" and now I have to pay $50/yr for Feedbin. While this isn't a big deal, I don't track that many feeds so it's kind of unpleasant to pay $50/yr for the 10 feeds I track.

> So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a 3rd party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view the feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the tracking and syncing so to speak.

Can you explain what this means? What's involved here? How does it differ from dumping all your RSS feeds into an ordinary RSS reader?

Think of Google Reader as a 3rd party sync API, and a variety of tools use this API.

lets use Twitter as an example.

Google Reader is Twitter with their API

Reeder (or your RSS reader with support for the API) is like Tweetbot.

This isn't a great example, because read status of feed items and all that is handled by Google Reader. But it's close.

Feedly has a free tier that's more than sufficient for such light use.

Problem with Feedly, in my experience, has been the rate they provide updates to feeds. I may track these 10 or so feeds which is low, but I do want timely updates to those feeds in my RSS app. Seeing delays of multiple hours is a lot less useful to me in several cases.

I realize I am sounding a bit whiny here. I just didn't have these problems with Google Reader and it sucks that the free option that worked well disappeared. At the end of the day though, $50/yr isn't a big deal, it's just a combination of everything becoming a damn subscription and how I'm sort of tired of subscriptions. Subscription fatigue is real for me.

It actually had really good social integration with gmail. I could have conversations with close friends on items in my feed.

Hilarious, as all replacements were trying to build a social interaction.

I had a great time with my friends on it. I've never had that much good discussions with my friends about anything since.

No competition back then.

The last interaction/version of Bloglines was really quite good, but at that point the user base has switched to Reader.

There were multiple options you could migrate your feeds to when it was shutdown. So I wouldn't say "no competition", but more some specific features that the competition didn't have.

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