1,200 Feeds and Nowhere to Go
The morning ritual went like this: bowl of cornflakes, Google Reader open, scroll from top to bottom until something sparked. Around 1,200 feeds—not all blogs, plenty of YouTube channels, Tumblr accounts, news sources, things I’d subscribed to years ago and kept because unsubscribing felt like a small death. That was the raw material. That was the job. And now Google has announced it’s shutting Reader down on July 1st.
If you’ve never used an RSS reader, the concept is almost aggressively sensible: instead of manually visiting every site you care about to check whether anything new has appeared, you subscribe to their feeds and a reader aggregates everything in one stream, updating itself every few minutes. Every blog, every channel, every Tumblr—chronological, unfiltered, no algorithm deciding what you see. It’s the opposite of how most people consume the internet now, and it’s better in almost every way that matters to someone who does this obsessively.
Google Reader had become so dominant over the past eight years that it stopped feeling like a product and started feeling like infrastructure. Other apps built on top of it—Reeder on iOS was essentially just a beautiful skin over Reader’s data. The whole ecosystem assumed Reader would simply persist, the way water comes out of a tap. Then last night it didn’t.
The stated reason is declining usage—Twitter and Facebook have absorbed the news-consumption habit for most people. Which is probably true, and completely beside the point for the rest of us. Twitter is noise with a search bar. Facebook is someone else’s algorithm curating your reality. RSS is a library where you personally chose every shelf, and now the building is being demolished because not enough people were using it.
The panic in the blogging world last night was immediate, even if the shutdown hadn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Google had been quietly neglecting Reader for a couple of years—removing features, letting the interface stagnate, treating it like a product they’d forgotten they owned. The announcement was still a gut punch. I have until July 1st to export my data and figure out where to put it.
The most useful response I’ve read came from Marco Arment, who built Instapaper, on his blog. His argument: Google Reader’s free dominance actually strangled the RSS ecosystem, because no competing paid product could survive against something Google gave away. Innovation froze. The market calcified around a tool the company didn’t care about maintaining. Now that it’s gone, there might actually be room for something genuinely better. Cold comfort, but probably correct.
Lifehacker has the rundown on alternatives. Feedly launched something called Project Normandy overnight, explicitly designed to absorb stranded Reader users—they’re building a compatible API so existing apps can point at Feedly instead of Google. NetVibes is the other name circulating. NewsBlur apparently exists and promptly buckled under the traffic spike last night, which is either a promising sign of demand or a troubling sign of what’s coming. Bloglovin’ is an option if you want everything to look like a mood board, which I don’t.
I’ll migrate. Obviously. The 1,200 feeds aren’t the problem—they’ll export as OPML and reimport somewhere else in twenty minutes. What doesn’t transfer is the specific shape the habit had worn into the morning. The sequence of it. The way Reader and a bowl of cornflakes and the first half hour of the day had become one continuous gesture. That’s what’s actually being buried here, and no amount of Feedly onboarding is going to put it back.
Goodbye, Google Reader. You became a standard the way useful things do—by being good at something boring and doing it quietly for years. Turns out that’s enough to miss.