In 10 days, Google’s RSS feed-reading service Google Reader will shut down for good. In its wake, developers working on products in the RSS ecosystem have been stepping up to deliver apps, tools and other services to fill the void. Today, one of the frontrunners, Feedly, is transforming itself from RSS application to RSS platform, with the public debut of Feedly Cloud, the infrastructure that has… → Read More
Move over Reeder, Feedly, Digg, NewsBlur, Feedbin and the rest of the RSS players who hope to pick up some new users with the impending demise of Google Reader. Facebook may also be looking to wade into the game. → Read More
In less than a month, Google Reader will shut down for good, according to the countdown timer on Digg.com, a company now in the process of building a replacement. For end users, the loss is one of a simple, fast and powerful front-end for browsing news feeds, but for developers working on apps in the RSS ecosystem, it means something even worse: the end of access to the Reader API. Today, Feedly… → Read More
The newsreader business has undergone major shifts in recent months. Flipboard has emerged as the consumer’s preferred mobile magazine, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million, Google Reader is shutting down, and now another early entrant, Flud, has refocused on the enterprise market. The company began quietly testing the waters about six months ago after feedback from customers hinted at… → Read More
Feedly, the RSS feed-reading client which is rapidly becoming the one to beat following the planned Google Reader shutdown, is today launching new versions of its Feedly Mobile client for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Android phones and tablets. This update, built in response to user feedback, is focused on improving search, productivity, discovery, and sharing. But the feature which is likely to… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened with Gillmor in Boston and the Gang in California. We took another cut at the Google Reader damage, with @dannysullivan hating on notifications and @scobleizer hating on Android’s notifications. Did I say I told him so? Yes I did.
But the mere fact we spent so much time on the stream’s destruction of… → Read More
Where are the users headed following news of Google Reader’s shutdown? To Feedly, it seems. We already heard the company announce it had passed half a million new users, but more importantly, Feedly is now winning on mobile, too. According to new U.S. App Store and Google Play data, Feedly is leaving competitors like NewsBlur and Reeder far behind. Even though Google Reader will remain for a few… → Read More
Verrrrry interesting. Last week, amid the Google Reader fallout, we noticed that Google had removed its RSS Subscription Chrome browser extension from the Chrome Web Store. While the move was not as high-profile as the Google Reader shutdown, it spoke more broadly of Google’s intentions towards the RSS format itself – that is, maybe the search giant was ready to distance itself from the… → Read More
Google Reader turned into a zombie a long time ago and it’s good that Google finally killed it. For years, Google Reader has been sitting on Google’s servers without any appreciable updates. Sure, it got a bit of a facelift in 2011, but it only lost functionality since Google decided to rip out its social features in an effort to drive people to Google+. Its core features hadn’t… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — enjoys a week of actual tech news for the first time in quite a while. Samsung’s latest big screen phone comes with a suite of Android add-ons, some of which tickle @scobleizer’s shiny bone while making it clear his rationale for switching to Android has more to do with pocketing his Google Glass base… → Read More
The idea of RSS was one that never quite gripped with normal Internet users. Sure, for us geeks who absolutely love consuming as much information as possible, RSS is a wonderland. When Google launched Reader in 2005, I can remember surfing to all of my favorite sites and looking for that little RSS logo, clicking on it and subscribing to the feed. So easy, so awesome to “us,” and so… → Read More
How long until Google shuts down Feedburner? The company just announced that it is shutting down Google Reader on July 1. That’s a sad day for all of us who still regularly use it, but its demise was probably inevitable. Reader had been lingering in a stasis for months (maybe even years) now, especially since Google ripped out its social core in favor of focusing on Google+ and barely… → Read More
It’s not clear what Google’s plans are for FeedBurner, its feed management and syndication platform. By the looks of it, FeedBurner has become a neglected platform, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it would get the axe in one of the company’s next rounds of “spring cleaning.” Not too long ago, Google decided to discontinue its AdSense for Feeds service, which was really the only way the… → Read More
As part of its latest round of “spring cleaning,” Google just announced that it is shuttering AdSense for Feeds. The service, which allows publishers to earn a bit of extra revenue by adding Google’s ads to their RSS feeds, will be retired on October 2 and will close on December 3. Given that Feedburner has long been expected to be on one of Google’s next spring cleaning lists, it doesn’t come as… → Read More
Feedly, as its name implies, is a service that started out as a better way for users to read their RSS feeds. But RSS never caught on in the mainstream, although it powers many of the social news-reading platforms we now use, such as Flipboard and Pulse. Today, Feedly is taking a big step toward joining the “in” crowd of magazine-style applications, with a dramatic redesign of its mobile apps for… → Read More
Remember when Google ruined its RSS news reader Google Reader by removing its built-in social features? Back in October, Google announced that it was removing Reader’s friending and following functions as well as its shared link blogs. For a niche crowd of heavy Google Reader users, this news came as a big blow. Like everything Google does these days, the changes came about because of Google+ … → Read More
Every few months or so, somebody will declare the death of RSS, and with it the death of old-school feed readers like Google Reader. Don’t tell that to Samuel Clay, though, the founder of Newsblur, a web-based feed reader that’s in Y Combinator’s current batch of startups. Newsblur has many interesting features besides the pure feed reading experience, but at first glance, the web app feels like a… → Read More
FLUD, the scrappy news reader backed by $1 million in seed funding, is today introducing FLUD 2.0 for Android and Windows Phone. FLUD 2.0, for those who don’t recall, was the big redesign that turned FLUD from being just another news reader into a true social news experience.
Although participating in a crowded space, where it goes up against better-known brands like Flipboard, Zite, and Pulse… → Read More
If there’s one thing wrong with Google+ it’s a lack of a real non-browser interface. There are workarounds and widgets, but there’s never been a real way to pull your G+ feed into a more comfortable format. While many would complain that RSS isn’t even close to a comfortable format, it’s bettern’ nuffin’.
That said, a new free service called GPlusRSS allows you to create a public RSS feed of… → Read More
Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.
The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts… → Read More
Diffbot is a geeky and incredibly interesting technology that uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to process the content on the Web the way a human being can. “The entire Internet can be broken down into 30 different page types” explains Co-founder Mike Tung, also known as “Diffbot Mike,” and “Diffbot can identify them all.” Diffbot knows the difference between a… → Read More
Cross-platform newsreader application News360 launched into version 2.0 today, a significant update that introduces its new personalization features. The news reader now learns from your activity on social Web services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and Evernote, in order to present you with stories that fit your interests.
But unlike some of its competitors, which there are now… → Read More
Here’s why I’m glad I was wrong about RSS being dead. The latest evidence of that comes from Jesse Stay who reported a week or so ago that both Facebook and Twitter had discontinued RSS streams or something like that. I really didn’t bother to read up on the details since it’s now years since I gave up on the stuff. These days I obsess about Lady GaGa and whether Brian Wilson’s version of Good… → Read More
Every few eons we get another RSS is dead swarm of stories, usually involving Dave Winer versus the rest of the universe. Sub-themes include dead calling is stupid, I found this post on RSS, and get off your porch grandpa. Typically Dave uses the event to launch yet another version of Radio 8 tricked out to convince us that his lack of business model business model beats traditional data silo… → Read More
For a long time after the launch of the iPhone, despite thousands of apps for just about everything you can imagine, there was no killer RSS reader app. That changed when the 2.0 version of Reeder arrived earlier this year. It’s so good that I often prefer using it to reading feeds in Google Reader, long my go-to RSS reader. And the iPad version is even better. And now it’s about ready to launch… → Read More
The news on Monday appears to be that Facebook will reinvent email. TechCrunch says it’s the long awaited Gmail killer. Others say it’s Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit’s project since he came to Facebook in the FriendFeed acquisition. Paul says he hasn’t been working on that, but rather the Big Freaking Zip File app where we can download all our Facebook bits. And anyway, he’s gone — off… → Read More
Google Reader has been my go-to RSS reader since October 7, 2005. How do I know? A new update to the service today tells me that and a few other interesting tidbits about my reading habits.
Technically, the big news of this update to Reader is a new fullscreen mode. I guess it’s nice to have in certain circumstances (just hit “f” to activate it). But to me that’s a little ho-hum. Much more… → Read More
Remember that famous expression championed by Sun Microsystems, “the network is the computer”? As the Internet gets more and more pervasive, that expression is becoming more true than ever. Case in point, Lexmark all-in-one printers now allow you to read any RSS feed on their touchscreen interface. That’s right, you can keep up with global politics or the latest World Cup action right from your… → Read More
In case you missed it, Apple announced the long-awaited iPad yesterday. And while there’s been no shortage of coverage by just about every technology-related blog on the planet, perhaps you’d like to be able to use Google Reader without every third post being about the device. If so, there’s a very simple search trick you can use to filter out all the iPad-related hoopla. → Read More
Distinguishing feeds on Google Reader can be a little hard. Since every feed has the same default blue RSS icon, it requires reading on your part to tell them apart. Reading is hard. Pictures are easier. Today, Google Reader takes a step in that direction by finally adding favicon support to feeds.
The new feature certainly livens up Google Reader quite a bit. The only problem now is that you… → Read More
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