23 Mobile Things: Thing 10 – Social Reading

I didn’t really set out to cover Thing 10 in the 23 mobile things project today, but that’s what happened. (I’m participating in the ANZ23MobileThings project and they’re not due to cover Thing 10 for a few weeks yet, so I’m jumping ahead!)

Moving to Feedly

Google Reader really is going  away soon. I was ignoring the inevitable, until today. I tested out a number of alternatives right after Google’s announcement. When nothing really resonated as a good replacement,  I decided to ignore the issue, while hoping one of the tools would eventually outshine the others.

After a less than thorough look at a couple of tools today, I decided to go with Feedly. It has a web service, iOS app and Android app, which fits my needs. After fiddling with various settings on the iPad app, I can see there’s lots of flexibility in how feeds are displayed and interacted with. I haven’t looked at all the options for sharing, synchronizing between apps and such, but decided it was time to bite the bullet and make the switch.

Importing your feeds into Feedly is easy, just log in with your Google Reader account and you’re set. After GR disappears on July 1, you’ll still use your GR account to login to Feedly, but they’ll have all your feeds safely stored on their own servers. Read their post for more on migrating and tips on making Feedly feel more like GR

I was determined to clean up my GR account before I migrated though. I’d let my GR account grow weeds. Lots and lots of weeds, so I spent several hours  deleting dead feeds, reorganizing folders, taking detours off to read lots of interesting posts I’d missed and finally exporting a backup copy of my GR account. There’s still work to do, I suspect I have far too many feeds, there’s more weeding to be done. But I’ll do that from my spiffy new account on Feedly.

Do Feed Readers Still Matter?

I  know that many people use Twitter as their primary source for finding blog posts and news items. I certainly rely on it heavily.  But I still like to visit RSS feeds and know that I’ve caught up on the blogs and news sites that I find most important. Twitter certainly helps me find sources that I wouldn’t have come across otherwise and there are any number of people I follow on twitter who can be counted on to find lots of interesting content. But I’d be willing to bet that those folks are relying on feed readers to find much of the content they’re  sharing. Why else would there have been such an outcry when Google announced it was closing down GR?