Readings: A replacement for Google Reader!

UPDATE: Readings the service has been made unavailable at the moment.

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There are many apps which act as replacement for Google Reader (Feedly, for instance), but I never liked any of them. Reason is simple, I can’t cope up with their interface, which is completely different from that of Google Reader. On the other hand,  Readings is something similar to Google Reader and that’s why I like it.

Readings is a new feed reader, especially for those who are bored with Google Reader. You may call it as a Modern Google Reader.

Where ‘Readings’ is better than Google Reader

• Start Page: Readings shows the top stories from the sites you’ve subscribed to, the relevancy of the top stories will certainly increase after it gains a considerable amount of users. Google Reader’s start page doesn’t show top stories, it just shows the articles from the feeds you’ve subscribed.

• Subscribing to Feeds: You get a nice list of top blogs in Readings, you can narrow the results by selecting the category. You can also subscribe to the feed of a specific author (like me!) so, even if the author writes on more than one blog, you will be getting the articles and Google Reader can’t do this.
• Interface: Readings’ interface is neat and simple, it also makes use website favicons, nothing more to say here.
• Sharing: I’m not at all satisfied with sharing options provided by Google Reader, but Readings rocks in sharing articles! Irrespective of the feed you’re viewing, you can see the Facebook like, send and Tweet buttons, and at the end of the each article an Add this widget is also embedded.

• Readability: You can change the font size from the left sidebar while reading an article, don’t have any time to read your favorite article? Click on Read Later and you can read it from the Unread section afterwards, no need of Instapaper! They do provide a handy bookmarklet to send interesting articles to Unread section!

Where it could improve…

• Subscribing To Feeds: I said subscribing to feeds in Readings is easy and better than that of Google Reader but wait, there’s a big disadvantage, you can’t import feeds from a .opml file! I have subscribed to 30+ blogs and it will take some 10-15 minutes to subscribe to all the blogs (Readings take time to cook the feed, it’s not instant). While, this is not the case with Google Reader, you can easily import feeds there.
• Organizing Feeds: In Google Reader, I have all my feeds categorized and that keeps my Google Reader organized, now, you can’t do this on Readings! You can’t create folders (or tags) and drop feeds into it as you do in Google Reader.
• No Unread Count: The Unread count in Google Reader gives you an idea of how many articles are left unread, Readings lacks this.
• Customizing The App: You can customize Google Reader to the deepest using Reader Plus and many such apps but will developers come forward to develop add-ons for Readings? Certainly not!

Readings is pretty new, so there’s a scope of improvement, hope they will come up with new features in the future. Do drop in your comments.

Link: Readings (rdn.gs)