Where will Google Reader traffic go? | Hacker News Reader

Where will Google Reader traffic go?

daltoncaldwell.com

37 pointsdalton32 comments

I'm not moving to another reader so my primary source of news will disappear overnight which I think is a shock I'm not ready to take. Come June I'll likely go to reader.google.com several times, if not just by mistake or out of habit.

Unless I haven't looked hard enough, I want:

* Reader software that can easily install onto a LNMP stack

* Runs in the browser (Desktop & Mobile)

* Has a UI that's extremely similar to Reader - including the inbox system!

* Is FLOSSy (No license preference)

Why?

* Prevent this from ever happening again (no vendor lock in!). It's also free.

* An app is fine but I have reader set to my homepage - it literally is my news source.

* Unlike others, I prefer the inbox system. Too many feeds? Unsubscribe.

* See point #1.

Any suggestions?

I suggest lowering your expectations.

PHP-based RSS reader with a similar UI? I don't really see that to be asking too much. How low should I go then?

Tiny Tiny Rss.

You can use some css themes to have tiny tiny rss to look like google reader.

I tried fever for a while but stuck with Tiny tiny, for me it works better due to the customization options and lower server footprint.

I also moved to tt-rss and it works well a few niggles aside.

About the worst thing I can say about it is that the main developer is rather abrasive.

I'm also happy with tt-rss. I considered myself a heavy user of Reader with about 500 feeds. The only negative I'm currently experiencing is that the mobile web version has been phased out by trunk, and the very good looking alternate tends to crash my phone's browser every few articles. Since there are multiple native Android clients, I'm not all that concerned.

I use the forked version of the Android client and it works very well. I think I tried the mobile web site briefly but don't really care since I do my main reading in a web browser on a desktop/laptop, and the rest on tablets which work the same and then a tiny minority of the time on a small screened mobile device.

I moved to TT-RSS immediately upon the GReader shutdown news. I'm perfectly happy with it.

Another vote for tt-rss here, too. I use my own 2006 vintate fork (I decided I couldn't handle trying to contribute patches back to the developer) and haven't kept current with the mainline code, but it has served me very well.

ownCloud News: http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=580

* ownCloud is mainly for LAMP but also works on Nginx (which I presume is the N): http://owncloud.org

* it’s a web app, and there are several mobile clients: https://github.com/owncloud/news#mobile-clients

* simple UI. What do you mean by »Inbox system«? (If it’s »unread items«, we have that)

* it’s open source, AGPL v3, code up at https://github.com/owncloud/news

* Plus: We have an API so anyone can code apps for it: https://github.com/owncloud/news/wiki/API-1.2

What do you think?

That looks very good actually. The best benefit is it looks like I can also store files and whatnot. Perhaps I can move several services to ownCloud. I'll take a look.

Yep. If you have any feedback or want to contribute please join in. :) All our stuff is at http://github.com/owncloud

Hey, it took me close to an hour to setup ownCloud (it's tricky to get it working correctly on Nginx). Now that the dust has settled, it's really nice. Thank you for making this.

(Sorry for the late reply, didn’t see your comment!)

Yeah, we’re focused on Apache, but there’s documentation for Nginx and others at https://github.com/owncloud/documentation/blob/stable5/admin...

If you have improvements to the documentation, please contribute at https://github.com/owncloud/documentation/blob/stable5/admin...

Thank you!

It doesn't meet all your requirements but try http://Readable.cc. You can sign up on the website or host it yourself.

https://github.com/ElbertF/Readable.cc

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

At this point surely the question is "where has Google Reader traffic gone?" Anyone who really cares about using Reader has hopefully moved on somewhere. Surely the new readers are showing up in web server logs by now?

My own weblog is too small to be much use, but Referer data I have suggests it's mostly Feedly. Unfortunately the Feedly scraper doesn't include the number of subscribers in its request headers. And these days the Referer header isn't nearly as useful as it used to be.

The clock is ticking, and I'm getting a little nervous because my primary use of Google Reader is maybe slightly unusual.

What I really need is something that's going to let me manage podcast feeds with a web interface, and sync those feeds to an Android app automatically. Any suggestions? I'm still using Google Listen even though it was abandoned ages ago, just because it gets this particular feature right.

Listen Up[1] (free version[2]) team is working on integrating it with gPodder.net[3] which, unfortunately, seems to be folding under the new load[4]. It's down right now, actually, and I don't remember their webUI but the desktop client[5] is nice so if you want to manage subscriptions from your computer, that's a way to do it. Not currently but in general. This is what I'm going with anyway.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.codepimps....

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.codepimps....

[3] http://codepimpsdotorg.blogspot.com/2013/05/listen-up-gpodde...

[4] http://codepimpsdotorg.blogspot.com/2013/06/listen-up-gpodde...

[5] http://gpodder.org/

I'm in a similar situation. I used to use Google Listen for podcasts (which was backed by Reader). I never used the online interface, but I've been using Listen a lot.

I tried a bunch of different free and paid apps, but I settled on Pocket Casts, which wasn't free. I'm happy with it - it syncs cross device, it has good config options, it looks gorgeous. I don't think there's a web interface, so it might not be the best for you.

The Beyondpod beta adds feedly support to replace the google reader functionality. Been using beyondpod for a while, and it's bloomin ace.

Other questions include how content providers behave. I've subscribed to the Dilbert Daily Strip feed for several years. About a week ago they decided they no longer want readers via RSS: http://feed.dilbert.com/dilbert/daily_strip

Yeah, I'm curious about that too. I'm feeling rather glad I jumped ship to e-mail a couple of years ago and will probably (though I'm not 100% sure yet) let most of my RSS-based stuff fall into disrepair.

I think a factor is Feedburner scraped the URL every 4 hours. Thousands of readers all for 6 hits a day? Easy. With Reader the load was minimal, now that everyone has splintered off the load could become astronomically higher due to inconsiderate configuration* and the lack of a centralised cache.

While Feedburner still exists, I doubt it'll be around for much longer. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

* I acknowledge some used Thunderbird or other clients to access RSS, however the majority used Reader which made the load much lower. Scraping every 15 minutes = 96 hits/user/day or other 'inconsiderate' options.

RSS is tiny and static. If your server can't handle a million hits a day to your RSS feed, you're doing it wrong.

Feedburner is a middleman that caches the real site's RSS feed. The readers (Google, Thunderbird, everyone else) contact feedburner for the RSS not the underlying site. RSS is also the same for every user (but doesn't have to be).

In any event consider whether it is is desirable for readers to automatically know about site updates, and to be able to catch up if they have missed a few, versus expecting them to manually visit.

Unfortunately we can't tell what the reason is behind the Dilbert change. It could range from a pre-emptive removal anticipating feedburner going away through some higher up deciding that the site is so important that people will manually visit instead. The only certain thing is they didn't have to make the change for technical reasons now.

One thing I can be certain of is that anyone in a company defending the provision/use of RSS will have a lot harder time due to Reader going away.

I used to read Dilbert every day, because my feed reader reminded me. Since they changed a week ago, I've only read it once, and that was days ago.

I'm using the AOL reader (yeah I really wrote that) at least initially. It's a very simple (one might say blah) interface that takes almost 0 effort to learn.

Most positive thing is that it was dead easy to import my Reader feed selection.

It would most definitely be weird if Google killing Reader gave AOL some relevance again.

I use Digg for feeds and soundcloud/youtube for podcasts. If the podcaster isn't using those mediums, I don't listen to them because there is a lack of a good audio podcasting listening service. Although... I have tried to use digg yet

I am hoping to get some traffic to http://multiplx.com

http://i.imgur.com/L3JPjqw.png Risky post, I know, but I find it telling that it seems like there are still a number of us scrambling to pick someone to move to, or at least dragging our feet to. I just am so used to clicking on the red and blue icon!

We are seeing some good traffic at http://talll.com not sure if it is related in any way to google reader shutting down.

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