As we all know tomorrow Google Reader RSS will officially be closing their doors. What does that mean for you/us? It means that through this service that has allowed us to read through news feeds, blog posts and articles in one central location, that it will be no more. I for one foolishly forgot about this and never researched a replacement service. When I went to Google Readers homepage and received the message pictures above I clicked the link provided which opened up a page like this one.
This simple breakdown (pictured above) explains a little bit of what Reader does and what you can do before you find a replacement service. They recommend Google Takeout. Now I am not a coding genius, far from it in fact and while I did as they suggested it brought up about five files that made absolutely zero sense to me when I opened them. So I went to the next best thing. I asked friends what their preferred reader was out of the three that I was aware of.
I have been playing around with the three readers above and so far I am liking Feedly the best. All three of them were beyond simple to set up and navigate. Simply create an account and import the Google Reader feed but Feedly is the only one that had any type personalization options beyond your basic tile or list viewing options. I am a very visual person so that is very high on my priority list. If you don't need to have the visual aspect then you should have no problems with any of the one's listed above. While I do love Feedly, the ease of set up, navigation and overall options I still wanted something with a bit more.....oomph. So I went hunting and what I found was
Flipboard. The only downside.....this is an iOS &Android based service so if you have an iPad, iPhone or Android this is the way to go. You can visit
https://editor.flipboard.com/ and do some basic account edits but not much beyond that. But let me show you right quick why that despite it only being available on mobile devices I will still be using it in addition to Feedly.
One last mentionable site that I've been hearing a lot of chatter about is
Bloganize. While they're still in the Beta phase the site is very user friendly and appealing to the eye. One difference that I noticed is that you can mark blog posts to read later and you can also mark them as favorites. Also you can create "stacks". A stack is an organized selection of blogs. If you see below I currently have three stacks. Those blogs on Blogger, General blogs and Social Media Moms. With stacks I can pick and choose who I want in which section and separate them by category if I choose to do so.
There you have it, my top picks on a replacement RSS reader service now that Google Reader is no longer. If you happen to find a service you absolutely love please share it here, I love hearing what others have found.
