Some people were/are emotionally invested in Reader, and to an extent it was so good that many people were dissuaded from building a better RSS reader.
It's almost too late to do that. Products that were slowly grinding are now seeing much more traction, and the initial exodus has passed. There may be a second one when it is officially stopped, but it would be difficult to compete with those products that grabbed customers already.
There will definitely be a second exodus. People such as myself are waiting to see what "wins out" over the next few months. I'm still adding feeds to my Reader account.
I'm still using reader because I don't care for feedly working as an extension to my browser and the news blur interface doesn't appeal to me. I'm waiting to see if something else pops up that offers the syncing feature of reader with a decent web app.
I agree. I'll also add that TheOldReader is a bit of a pain to add to. You have to search for your feed in another window, then find the RSS or Atom link, then manually copy link to add it as a subscription. That's a lot of stepa. Also, I used their import queue, and nothing has happened for days.
Problem solved then. Other feed readers exist, so what's your point?!
There are other webmail providers, search engines and social networks too. What's your point?
Those haven't just been withdrawn. Google just opened up the feed aggregator space.