6 ms·

Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative

175 points by ashamedlion 14y ago

bochoh 14y ago
This looks great. A few animated fish and/or bubbles down towards the bottom of the list could break up the monotony of that long list. (Or even let the ship sink slowly as the ready scrolls down.)
lowmagnet 14y ago
Nice stuff, I voted for Fever, even though it has some usability issues.
- nwh 14y ago
  The results it pulls together aren't stellar, and the DRM (if you could call it that) makes me ridiculously uncomfortable too.
afx2in 14y ago
i like flipboard the best, but it still needs google reader for my rss feeds...
lucaspiller 14y ago
Love the CSS animation :D
themgt 14y ago
Very nice! I'd really like if you could mark which ones are available open source to run yourself.
ronbo 14y ago
its nice - but you might want to just mine the twitters mentioning these sites to get a bit more content.
tutuca 14y ago
Made me learn about http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.feedly.com/ which looks really nice.
brianwillis 14y ago
Nice touch with the bobbing ship on the side there.
charlieok 14y ago
It's worth separating clients from servers, and noting which clients can sync with which servers.
xpose2000 14y ago
Well done. This site was worth the work, even if it will be a short lived project. I voted for feedly. Those guys also promised a smooth transition once google reader shuts down. Not sure what else you could want.
- ktrgardiner 14y ago
  But it's certainly a format which can be expanded upon and applied to the recommending of any number of things.
loire280 14y ago
This is a great idea, but I think the rush to find an alternative is premature - there's going to be a huge shift in the RSS reader landscape over the next few months, and the best alternative may not even be announced yet.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Switching an RSS reader isn't (or shouldn't be) particularly onerous, so there's really no reason to avoid switching even if a new one comes later.
mikemoka 14y ago
very nice, I also suggest http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?platform=online http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?platform=on...
cwp 14y ago
This is great! There is one thing missing though. I tried to subscribe to the site in Reader and it couldn't find a feed. Could you?
asdstuff 14y ago
i just found out, i can import my feeds to yandex.com's reader. fast, minimal interface without any bullshit.
tempestn 14y ago
Does Feedly have a web-based client? I'm looking for something to recommend to users at www.searchtempest.com. Many of them have never used (or even heard of) RSS before, so simplicity is key.
- wubbfindel 14y ago
  They have an "in-browser" client, but I think you may have to install the correct extension for it to work. Check out www.feedly.com.
  - tempestn 14y ago
    Ya, I did. Was hoping I'd missed it somehow. Looks like it's just Chrome, Firefox, iOS and Android. Great for you or I, but not for many of my users unfortunately.
ajtaylor 14y ago
I'm getting an Internal Server Error. :(
- ashamedlion 14y ago
  Sorry, lots of traffic. If you refresh a couple times, it usually comes back :)
ufo 14y ago
My problem right now is not getting a list of names of popular feed readers - I can already see that by just browsing any of the many comment threads that have popped up on the internet where people bring up their favourite alternative. What I really need is something to help me make a decision, by comparing what features does each reader support and so on. How much does it cost? Can I see my read in multiple devices? Does it work on smartphones? Can I share links with people? etc...
- ashamedlion 14y ago
  We are most likely going to be adding this. It was in the original plan, but we wanted to get something out first.
- mr_penguin 14y ago
  Agreed; ideally a comparison against all of greaders existing features to make it easier so that you could select which greader features you're using and get a list of relevant matching options.
colbyh 14y ago
Nitpicking I know but reusing the Google Reader favicon actually caused me confusion for a second. Cool idea though, and way more interesting than what I did last night! Anyone complaining about "the RSS landscape changingblah blah blah" must really hate fun. Someone did this in a night to address an immediate problem and probably had a blast doing it, let the guy (girl?) enjoy the fruit of their labor.
jsmeaton 14y ago
Am I the only one who just wants a list of updated articles and possibly an unread count? I don't want social in my RSS. I don't want to "discover" feeds. I don't want to be told what to read. I don't want to follow people. For me, the whole point of RSS is that I find a site I like, I add it to my list, and I'm told when there's a new article. I've tried several alternatives in the last 24 hours, and most of them ignore my actual feeds and give me a whole lot of machine learned articles I couldn't care less about. It's not always the topic that's interesting, it's the writing style, or some kind of imaginary connection I've made with the site or author. If I want to 'discover' articles, I'll browse HN or Reddit. If it's something I think I'll want to keep updated about, that's when I add it to my RSS.
- dstroot 14y ago
  Absolutely 100% spot on. Amen!
- robotmay 14y ago
  This is what I want too, and that's why I'm gonna take a stab at building my own. I don't really want to share an article about spoon carving, but hot damn do I want to read it.
  - jsmeaton 14y ago
    If there was a scratch your own itch project, I believe this is it for me. I was disappointed to learn iGoogle was closing down, as that was my primary interface to Google Reader. There are alternatives to IG (NetVibes; which is sort of horrible), but you can't present feeds as a widget. So yes, I believe I'll give RSS Reading a crack, and create a NetVibes widget, and see if I can get exactly back to where I was before these spring cleaning announcements.
- arbitrarywords 14y ago
  If you solve this problem can you please reply to your comment with the solution. Thanks.
- czervik 14y ago
Fizzer 14y ago
This isn't how you go about finding which is the best. This is how you go about finding which is the most popular. Voting is inherently skewed towards popularity, which is not always correlated with quality. From the headline, I had assumed you spent all night learning the ins and outs of every option and were going to present your findings. I was disappointed to find this was just a poll.
- mr_penguin 14y ago
  I was expecting a feature comparison as well. Does anyone know where one is available? There are a lot of overlapping features to consider depending on individual usage. Features like tagging, cross platform and mobile, social, scaleability, web/self hosted, price will all be a important factors for most trying to make a decision.
- ashamedlion 14y ago
  Indeed, this is actually our eventual goal. The idea was to get something out, aggregate the most exhaustive list of RSS readers and then add the comparison details. It takes time!
dstroot 14y ago
How are you guys processing the tweets to show the results? Would love to know more about that.
- jbackus 14y ago
  We're using Ruby, Sinatra, HTTParty, Twitter Search API, Postgres, and Unicorn on a Heroku instance. Basically requesting the page pulls recent tweets from twitter matching the search '#replacereader', those tweets are checked against the DB to prevent dupe counting or multiple votes from one account, and new votes are added accordingly. Vote counts along with our list of replacements are pulled from the database and passed to a haml view, and unicorn caches page requests (including DB lookups and Twitter lookups) for 60 seconds to prevent exceeding APIs or Heroku's Postgres database limits.
  - dstroot 14y ago
    THANKS!
latraveler 14y ago
Feedly looks cool and all, but how do I add a feed? I spent 2 minutes and still can't figure it out.
mmahemoff 14y ago
Chuffed to be included here, thanks! Would you mind switching the tag to #PlayerFM as a lot of Twitter clients will treat the "." incorrectly.
- ashamedlion 14y ago
  Alright, fixed it!
latraveler 14y ago
Does anyone know how a good solution to this. http://superuser.com/questions/566201/google-reader-export-import-rss-article-history http://superuser.com/questions/566201/google-reader-export-i...
3amOpsGuy 14y ago
Really impressed with the aesthetics, especially for such a quick turnaround. Had a peek under the covers and it appears to be well done there too. Top marks in my book.
- jbackus 14y ago
  Thank you! I threw together the backbone action under the hood, all credit goes to Alain for the awesome design. We're pretty sure this post would have about 3 upvotes had it not been for the bobbing ship.
mattmcknight 14y ago
Surprised Feedly is so highly ranked. I tried it out after the last set of Google Reader changes and deleted it after about a week. The mobile app is really awful for skimming lots of content and is too focused on presenting a newspaper like layout. It's all pictures...
- gnoupi 14y ago
  Also, the Chrome extension is taking some liberties to "personalize suggestions": https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permissions_are_too_broad_why https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permiss...
drewschrauf 14y ago
I adore the design. Nice touch with the sinking ship.
smnl 14y ago
Thanks for the shoutout for BlogRoll! :)
budman 14y ago
I am really surprised in all these Google Reader threads I have not seen mention of the free, self-hosted and perfectly simple RSSLounge. I been using it for three years now and even donated. Development has stalled on this one though but the developer has a new RSS project with more social stuff. It is called Selfoss and is at http://selfoss.aditu.de/ http://selfoss.aditu.de/ .
theone 14y ago
Isn't it strange that Newsblur is not even in top 5, the other poll[1] on HN suggested other wise. It was at top of the list on HN Poll. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538
- ashamedlion 14y ago
  Some sites more aggressively got their users to tweet the required hashtags than others.
emrekosmaz 14y ago
I would like to introduce MultiPLX as another alternative to Google Reader. As one of the founders, I would appreciate if you guys can try and provide your feedback on the same. Try: http://multiplx.com/index.html http://multiplx.com/index.html
olegp 14y ago
I've been doing the same and adding them to StartHQ: https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader The web app profile pages include speed & trustworthiness info as well as mentions of the app on Hacker News. I will also add popularity rankings and TLDR versions of the ToS over the next few days.

175 points by ashamedlion 14y ago

This looks great. A few animated fish and/or bubbles down towards the bottom of the list could break up the monotony of that long list. (Or even let the ship sink slowly as the ready scrolls down.)

lowmagnet 14y ago

Nice stuff, I voted for Fever, even though it has some usability issues.

nwh 14y ago
The results it pulls together aren't stellar, and the DRM (if you could call it that) makes me ridiculously uncomfortable too.

afx2in 14y ago

i like flipboard the best, but it still needs google reader for my rss feeds...

lucaspiller 14y ago

Love the CSS animation :D

themgt 14y ago

Very nice! I'd really like if you could mark which ones are available open source to run yourself.

ronbo 14y ago

its nice - but you might want to just mine the twitters mentioning these sites to get a bit more content.

tutuca 14y ago

Made me learn about http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.feedly.com/ which looks really nice.

brianwillis 14y ago

Nice touch with the bobbing ship on the side there.

charlieok 14y ago

It's worth separating clients from servers, and noting which clients can sync with which servers.

xpose2000 14y ago

Well done. This site was worth the work, even if it will be a short lived project. I voted for feedly. Those guys also promised a smooth transition once google reader shuts down. Not sure what else you could want.

ktrgardiner 14y ago
But it's certainly a format which can be expanded upon and applied to the recommending of any number of things.

loire280 14y ago

This is a great idea, but I think the rush to find an alternative is premature - there's going to be a huge shift in the RSS reader landscape over the next few months, and the best alternative may not even be announced yet.

icebraining 14y ago
Switching an RSS reader isn't (or shouldn't be) particularly onerous, so there's really no reason to avoid switching even if a new one comes later.

mikemoka 14y ago

very nice, I also suggest http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?platform=online http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?platform=on...

cwp 14y ago

This is great! There is one thing missing though. I tried to subscribe to the site in Reader and it couldn't find a feed. Could you?

asdstuff 14y ago

i just found out, i can import my feeds to yandex.com's reader. fast, minimal interface without any bullshit.

tempestn 14y ago

Does Feedly have a web-based client? I'm looking for something to recommend to users at www.searchtempest.com. Many of them have never used (or even heard of) RSS before, so simplicity is key.

wubbfindel 14y ago
They have an "in-browser" client, but I think you may have to install the correct extension for it to work. Check out www.feedly.com.
- tempestn 14y ago
  Ya, I did. Was hoping I'd missed it somehow. Looks like it's just Chrome, Firefox, iOS and Android. Great for you or I, but not for many of my users unfortunately.

ajtaylor 14y ago

I'm getting an Internal Server Error. :(

ashamedlion 14y ago
Sorry, lots of traffic. If you refresh a couple times, it usually comes back :)

ufo 14y ago

My problem right now is not getting a list of names of popular feed readers - I can already see that by just browsing any of the many comment threads that have popped up on the internet where people bring up their favourite alternative. What I really need is something to help me make a decision, by comparing what features does each reader support and so on. How much does it cost? Can I see my read in multiple devices? Does it work on smartphones? Can I share links with people? etc...

ashamedlion 14y ago
We are most likely going to be adding this. It was in the original plan, but we wanted to get something out first.
mr_penguin 14y ago
Agreed; ideally a comparison against all of greaders existing features to make it easier so that you could select which greader features you're using and get a list of relevant matching options.

colbyh 14y ago

Nitpicking I know but reusing the Google Reader favicon actually caused me confusion for a second. Cool idea though, and way more interesting than what I did last night! Anyone complaining about "the RSS landscape changingblah blah blah" must really hate fun. Someone did this in a night to address an immediate problem and probably had a blast doing it, let the guy (girl?) enjoy the fruit of their labor.

jsmeaton 14y ago

Am I the only one who just wants a list of updated articles and possibly an unread count? I don't want social in my RSS. I don't want to "discover" feeds. I don't want to be told what to read. I don't want to follow people. For me, the whole point of RSS is that I find a site I like, I add it to my list, and I'm told when there's a new article. I've tried several alternatives in the last 24 hours, and most of them ignore my actual feeds and give me a whole lot of machine learned articles I couldn't care less about. It's not always the topic that's interesting, it's the writing style, or some kind of imaginary connection I've made with the site or author. If I want to 'discover' articles, I'll browse HN or Reddit. If it's something I think I'll want to keep updated about, that's when I add it to my RSS.

dstroot 14y ago
Absolutely 100% spot on. Amen!
robotmay 14y ago
This is what I want too, and that's why I'm gonna take a stab at building my own. I don't really want to share an article about spoon carving, but hot damn do I want to read it.
- jsmeaton 14y ago
  If there was a scratch your own itch project, I believe this is it for me. I was disappointed to learn iGoogle was closing down, as that was my primary interface to Google Reader. There are alternatives to IG (NetVibes; which is sort of horrible), but you can't present feeds as a widget. So yes, I believe I'll give RSS Reading a crack, and create a NetVibes widget, and see if I can get exactly back to where I was before these spring cleaning announcements.
arbitrarywords 14y ago
If you solve this problem can you please reply to your comment with the solution. Thanks.
czervik 14y ago

Fizzer 14y ago

This isn't how you go about finding which is the best. This is how you go about finding which is the most popular. Voting is inherently skewed towards popularity, which is not always correlated with quality. From the headline, I had assumed you spent all night learning the ins and outs of every option and were going to present your findings. I was disappointed to find this was just a poll.

mr_penguin 14y ago
I was expecting a feature comparison as well. Does anyone know where one is available? There are a lot of overlapping features to consider depending on individual usage. Features like tagging, cross platform and mobile, social, scaleability, web/self hosted, price will all be a important factors for most trying to make a decision.
ashamedlion 14y ago
Indeed, this is actually our eventual goal. The idea was to get something out, aggregate the most exhaustive list of RSS readers and then add the comparison details. It takes time!

dstroot 14y ago

How are you guys processing the tweets to show the results? Would love to know more about that.

jbackus 14y ago
We're using Ruby, Sinatra, HTTParty, Twitter Search API, Postgres, and Unicorn on a Heroku instance. Basically requesting the page pulls recent tweets from twitter matching the search '#replacereader', those tweets are checked against the DB to prevent dupe counting or multiple votes from one account, and new votes are added accordingly. Vote counts along with our list of replacements are pulled from the database and passed to a haml view, and unicorn caches page requests (including DB lookups and Twitter lookups) for 60 seconds to prevent exceeding APIs or Heroku's Postgres database limits.
- dstroot 14y ago
  THANKS!

latraveler 14y ago

Feedly looks cool and all, but how do I add a feed? I spent 2 minutes and still can't figure it out.

mmahemoff 14y ago

Chuffed to be included here, thanks! Would you mind switching the tag to #PlayerFM as a lot of Twitter clients will treat the "." incorrectly.

ashamedlion 14y ago
Alright, fixed it!

latraveler 14y ago

Does anyone know how a good solution to this. http://superuser.com/questions/566201/google-reader-export-import-rss-article-history http://superuser.com/questions/566201/google-reader-export-i...

3amOpsGuy 14y ago

Really impressed with the aesthetics, especially for such a quick turnaround. Had a peek under the covers and it appears to be well done there too. Top marks in my book.

jbackus 14y ago
Thank you! I threw together the backbone action under the hood, all credit goes to Alain for the awesome design. We're pretty sure this post would have about 3 upvotes had it not been for the bobbing ship.

mattmcknight 14y ago

Surprised Feedly is so highly ranked. I tried it out after the last set of Google Reader changes and deleted it after about a week. The mobile app is really awful for skimming lots of content and is too focused on presenting a newspaper like layout. It's all pictures...

gnoupi 14y ago
Also, the Chrome extension is taking some liberties to "personalize suggestions": https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permissions_are_too_broad_why https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permiss...

drewschrauf 14y ago

I adore the design. Nice touch with the sinking ship.

smnl 14y ago

Thanks for the shoutout for BlogRoll! :)

budman 14y ago

I am really surprised in all these Google Reader threads I have not seen mention of the free, self-hosted and perfectly simple RSSLounge. I been using it for three years now and even donated. Development has stalled on this one though but the developer has a new RSS project with more social stuff. It is called Selfoss and is at http://selfoss.aditu.de/ http://selfoss.aditu.de/ .

theone 14y ago

Isn't it strange that Newsblur is not even in top 5, the other poll[1] on HN suggested other wise. It was at top of the list on HN Poll. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538

ashamedlion 14y ago
Some sites more aggressively got their users to tweet the required hashtags than others.

emrekosmaz 14y ago

I would like to introduce MultiPLX as another alternative to Google Reader. As one of the founders, I would appreciate if you guys can try and provide your feedback on the same. Try: http://multiplx.com/index.html http://multiplx.com/index.html

olegp 14y ago

I've been doing the same and adding them to StartHQ: https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader The web app profile pages include speed & trustworthiness info as well as mentions of the app on Hacker News. I will also add popularity rankings and TLDR versions of the ToS over the next few days.