Since Google has announced the closure of Google Reader, there has been a countdown to the the 1st July date. With 5 days to go, you can look up some of the alternatives to Google Reader we have reviewed here.
If you are this post on Google Reader, you can then subscribe to our RSS Feeds on published on Devils’ Workshop. You can directly subscribe using Feedly, Newsblur and The Old Reader.
There are some other alternatives like AOL Reader (review) but at the moment they are still heavily in beta and web only versions are available. You can still use our RSS Feed link to subscribe on any Feed Reader of your choice.
Check our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ updates if you want to stay in touch using social media platforms.
Since Google Readers day were numbered, I thought for a while of moving away from RSS feeds and replacing it with Twitter. I found some Google Reader alternatives and I abandoned the idea of replacing RSS feeds. Now I wanted something that coverts Twitter accounts into RSS feeds.
Twitter used to support RSS feeds officially sometime ago. But it has since abandoned RSS and expects people to follow accounts on apps and the browser.
Twitter-RSS Features
Twitter-Rss.com is a website that allows users to create RSS feeds of any Twitter account.
Just enter the username of the account you want and click on “Get RSS”.
The RSS feeds is generated and its URL can be used on most Feed readers.
I found Twitter-RSS is useful for following a Twitter account for news with continuous updates. Also it is useful mainly for people who are extremely active on Twitter.
Flipboard today updated its app for the iPad and brought in a new feature. This feature allows users to create public or private magazines with their favorite collections. While many users who use Flipboard actually use it to consume their social and RSS feeds, they could not really interact with other users.
This is basically a collection of webpages that can be bookmarked and saved with other Flipboard users. We can create these personalized magazines using a bookmarklet too. This makes it useful as we can bookmark some pages into magazines from your desktop browser and then get back to them on a tablet.
Flipboard also displays publicly available magazines prominently. This in reality makes Flipboard into a social network of content curators.
At the moment this update is available only on iPad but should be available on Android soon.
There are also many Google Reader alternatives ramping up their plans. Also Digg which once specialized in social bookmarking is promising a new RSS feed reader. This is a great time for smaller companies who are specializing in tracking content publishing and feeds. The problem with companies as large as Google is they might not be able to dedicate innovative minds on a fulltime basis to smaller projects but that is not a problem with smaller companies.
At the moment, Flipboard is really coming out with some innovative features but its only downside is it does not have a web application to use from the browser.
Google has announced to stop supporting Google Reader and shut it down as a service. This will be a big blow people who consume most of their information using RSS feeds. I for one visit Google Reader several times a day to check on the latest posts from my favorite blogs. Google Reader will shut down on July 1, 2013. That leaves users about three months to find something new.
Google suggests that dwindling usage and focus on newer things at Google is the reason for shutting down the service. I will be very surprised they just allowed these users to move to other platforms and not give users something useful with Google+.
If you are thinking of using FeedDemon, a service that is similar to Google Reader, then think again. FeedDemon too announced they will be shutting down their service as it was dependent on Google Reader for synchronization.
RSS is Dying!
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The fact is RSS feeds are dying. Check major news publications and they do not support RSS feeds. It is a simple option but it never caught on. Media consumption is being done through more and more via social networks. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and more are all allowing users to consume and discover content. The advantage with RSS feeds is you had a lot more control over the type of content you were to discover. The disadvantage is that you do not easily come across newer type of content, blogs and writers. That lack of social layer on RSS feeds is what is making it unpopular over time.
The best part of RSS feed readers is that we were not stuck with one. We can more from one service to another. I cannot do that with Facebook. For instance I cannot move my Facebook lists to Twitter or Google+. Social media controls your data and makes you stay loyal but making it difficult for you to move it away to another social network.
The saddest part of this is that I doubt some new startup will actually find a way to leverage the loss of Google Reader. This is because no successful start-up company would ever work at providing a service where the number of users are actually shrinking. RSS feeds are simply all set to die.
Google might kill Feedburner!
Google might kill off another product called Feedburner soon. This was basically a RSS feed manager and is a very popular tool for bloggers. If you are reading this post on a RSS feed or on email (because you subscribed to it)it is being served to you through Feedburner.
Feedburner has also suffered a lot of neglect from Google and I won’t be surprised that a year from now Google Reader and Feedburner was something that safely belonged to the distant past.
The world of tech has lost a great mind today. Aaron Swartz was a coder, geek and an internet activist. At the age of 14 he helped co-authored RSS 1.0 specification. He also founded a company which was later acquired by Reddit.
Aaron Swartz committed suicide today. He was only 26 years old.
Aaron Swartz was recently more in the news for his internet activism. He was a indicted in the US for allegedly downloading millions of files by breaking into JSTOR which was a subscription based service.
I spend hours online and a lot of it is dedicated to reading my feeds on Google Reader. I am sure a lot of you reading this post are doing so because you subscribed to our RSS feed. To think that a 14 year old was a major contributor to this technology, which is literally the backbone of online publishing is mind boggling.
To think that the the same person felt his life was not worth living anymore is very tragic.
Twitter seems to be a continous stream of information and it is rather difficult to keep track of some important tweets that you liked or would like to get back to at a later time.
One way to keep track of an important tweet is to favorite it. This way you can get back to it anytime you want and do not need to use Twitter’s search feature which is not exactly great.
Creating a RSS Feed of Favorite Tweets
I personally like following things I am interested with Google Reader and I tried to search for quick way to create RSS feeds out of all the tweets I mark as favorite.
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Thankfully, Twitter itself has a great feature which is not as well known to create RSS feeds of any user’s favourite tweets.
Just replace “devils_workshop” into any account’s username to created the desired RSS feed.
Archiving Favorite Tweets to Evernote
If you like saving notes on Evernote then this Ifft feature is a great way to archive all your favorite tweets to your Evernote account.
Just visit the this ifttt link and connect your Twitter and Evernote accounts. It will automatically archive all your favorite tweets to Evernote. Do note you will have to create a ifttt account.
