Feedly Blog

"RSS industry"?!

I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them.

One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor.

Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so.
Neither is it a commentary on standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived interests, something companies are wont to do.

As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity:

http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-with-full-width-support/

http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur

http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader

When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be skeptic.

This is exactly what I've been thinking. The conversation about "RSS readers" is really about several different components that are integrated in to a comprehensive product:

* A backend for managing subscriptions, read/unread status, tagging, etc

* A web UI for reading your feed from anywhere

* A native-client (iOS, Android, OS X, etc) for accessing your feed from your devices

Users of the Google Reader web UI need the full stack, and there are already alternatives, but there are many native-client users who don't need the full stack. They only need the backend.

If someone were to roll a Google Reader API compatible feed subscription and sync service, I think they could recoup their investment pretty easily.

UPDATE: It looks like Feedly has "Normandy" waiting in the wings, but I'm not sure how access and fees will shake out for third-party developers. I'd really like to stick to my existing native-client (Reeder), so here's hoping that they make it reasonable and everyone gets on-board.

http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/

bastards. they never seem to realize how much they damage our trust with these actions. it effects all of their future products. I don't trust them anymore.

anyway feedly has a replacement coming soon:

http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/

> We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.

> If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlesly

I still use RSS. I use Feedly to curate various RSS feeds and many website still have them, or at least the tech focussed ones.

I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed.

Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have some news sources that don't publish a RSS feed. Unfortunately this wouldn't work with anything that requires authentication like private Twitter feeds for example.

[0] https://blog.feedly.com/easily-follow-websites-that-dont-have-rss-feeds/

Feedly posted this to their blog today:

http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/

Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly

Google Reader
Posted on March 14, 2013 by @feedly

Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting from some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandie back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered.

jwz is just a bit behind because he's on iOS.

As of this writing, only one iOS app (Newsify) is ready while two Android apps (Press and gReader) and a widget (Pure News) are. See: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/19/feedly-cloud/

This will presumably be sorted out soon. Perhaps the combination of Feedly's late deployment and Apple's approval process have complicated things for some developers. I did notice that both Press and gReader had to bugfix their initial Feedly support. I can certainly imagine an iOS developer having a harder time dealing with a late-breaking issue like that.