On Google Reader and the Search for a Decent RSS Aggregator

With the forecasted demise of Google Reader this summer, hopefully some of you have felt the pain and frustration that I went through last February when Microsoft summarily retired Live Mesh, "retired" here meaning in the Blade Runner sense. This is the price we pay for giving our data to third parties. We give them our data: our e-mail, our files, our feeds. They ask us to let them hold onto our music and our pictures and our Groupons and our love letters and all the ones and zeroes that have some kind of meaning to us, and we hope against hope that they don't just change their minds one day because the histogram doesn't look good enough.

I absolutely cannot fault Google in this. They don't owe me anything. I never liked Reader, but I have to admit I got used to it. I was a Bloglines man for many years, a little web-based workhorse that was run, then run into the ground, by Ask.com. A few years ago it was obvious that the production Bloglines engine was profoundly buggy and unusable. The beta site was slick, but even its quirks were never resolved, and that's when I went on my second big search for a better RSS feed aggregator.

I reluctantly settled on Google Reader, and for all its faults it was still the least bad selection available. They eventually worked most of the kinks out of it and it went from least-bad to decent. I grew to rely on it with the same regularity that I used to use Bloglines, even though the mobile experience left much to be desired.

Now I find myself in the same scenario again, where I yet again need to find a decent aggregator. Lots of folks suggest Feedly, which I tried out again a few days ago and it's just as terrible as I remember it being.

The re-vamped and re-imagined Bloglines, which I ran from screaming a few years ago the last time I wanted my old Bloglines back, is largely unchanged but again this is not a quest for the best aggregator, just the one that is least awful.

To be completely honest, I'm glad Reader is going away. Google gets less of my daily dose of attention and all the juicy marketing analytics that comprises. I'm ever so shyly happy that my personal data has been officially deemed as "not worth having". Now all they have to do is shut down GMail and Talk and I'll be free.

The new Bloglines, which is actually kind of old at this point, suffers from the same kinds of problems that most modern schizophrenic UIs have: the full feature set is only available to you if you bounce between interfaces. It's not just Windows 8 of course but that's a clear example. Nearly every program these days, big and small, has different possible layouts from which to choose. Bloglines allows you to add new tabs in both its "widget" and "reader" modes, but I've only found how to remove them in widget mode. Importing OPML files has a similar dichotomy, wherein advanced import options are only available if you click "Add Content" while in reader mode, not "Add Content" while in widget mode.

Sigh. The more I think about it, the more I want Google Reader back. Then I jab a fork into my thigh until I come to my senses.