![]() ![]() It requires a free plug-in for the Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers. In fact, Feedly says the ranks of its 4 million users have swelled to 7 million since Google’s Reader death sentence was announced. The one everybody keeps admiring though, is. Some email programs can subscribe to these feeds, too, dropping them right into your inbox. ![]() Some are Web pages like Google Reader others are stand-alone programs or apps. Newsreaders are available for every kind of phone, tablet and computer: Bloglines, NewsBlur, Pulse, Taptu, Reeder, FeedDemon, Spundge, Good Noows, HiveMined, Prismatic, Netvibes, NetNewsWire, ManagingNews and so on. In fact, I fully intended to offer capsule reviews of each of them, until I realised that six presidential administrations would pass by the time I finished. Google Reader has plenty of rivals and satisfying replacements. The masses may not have used Reader or even heard of it, but information devotees, news hounds and tech followers loved it. And once you’ve set up your preferred sources of reading material, they show up identically on every computer, tablet and phone. It is, however, complete, customisable and convenient. There was a huge outcry when Google announced the imminent death of Reader – petitions, blogs, the works – but you might not immediately understand why. It’s all much faster and more efficient than wading through the ads, the blinking and the less interesting articles on the originating websites themselves. One click takes you to the originating website. Usually, though, you see the headline of each item and a quick description of the article, or maybe the first few paragraphs and an accompanying picture. Occasionally, you can read the entire article without leaving the newsreader page that’s up to whoever published the article. You skim the headlines, you read summaries, you click the ones that seem worth reading. There, you find a tidy list of all the new articles from all of those sources, organised like an email Inbox. Instead of sitting down at your desk each morning and visiting each of your favourites sites in turn – say,, and – you just open. It’s like an online newspaper you assemble yourself from Web pages all over the world. Google Reader is what’s called, somewhat geekily, a newsreader, or painfully geekily, an RSS aggregator. This column is intended to help two kinds of people: Those who used Google Reader, and those who never even knew what it is. Google hasn’t provided much in the way of a satisfying reason for this “spring cleaning,” saying only that “usage has declined.” To the dismay of millions, that service will go the way of Google Answers, Google Buzz, iGoogle and GOOG-411. On July 1, it will take away Google Reader. Well, if we didn’t get it before, we get it now: Google giveth, and Google taketh away. The search engine behemoth is killing its popular RSS reader. ![]()
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