Dear God in Heaven please let them take him up on it. Now that I'm a few days into the new redesign my workflow has become 1. Read RSS feeds. 2. Research RSS feed readers.
Until recently Google Reader was just good enough but with the recent changes, it became just too painful. I'm not talking about the "social" features; I never used them. It was the poor layout and design, wasted real estate and especially the broken key shortcuts that did it.
So now Google has lost access to all my RSS habits.
It has also been a lesson to me in SaaS solutions (Software as a Service). When the provider can make substantial changes in their service at a whim, they can leave you high and dry. You're no better off than when you put yourself in the hands of a commercial software vendor or, dare I say it, Ubuntu :-)
Now happily reading the HN feed and others through gnus...
Today I switched to Bloglines, and I can keep using j, k, etc.
I have to thank Google, however, for making my switch so easy with their export utility...
The reason I think this extension makes sense is purely because users should have control over the way in which they read and see content. I'm not a big fan of restrictions being imposed on us just because some designer somewhere thought that's the way it should be. I've built in an editor that let's you create your own viewing interface. Give it a shot!
(If you'd like to check it out, http://getlilina.org/ )
As soon as I see that something was written in PHP, my prejudices announce that it is probably badly written and full of security holes.
- Get rid of the sidebar completely and just allow to navigate through feeds with j and k keys.
- Ability to save posts for later.
No social features, and no straightforward way to sync across computers/devices, so it's not at all a replacement for Google Reader in its entirety.