Google Reader On Death Bed: 5 Best Google Reader Alternatives To Consider

(Before It's News)

Reading on the web and keeping tab of all your favorite blogs is going be different. The long-standing, almost ubiquitous, Google Reader will see the dusk soon. So what’s going to happen to millions of readers who use Google Reader? Thankfully, alternatives exist.

Here are five that are worth checking out:

1. Feedly. Most of us are visual. Even those of us who aren’t won’t deny the appeal visuals have on our overall reading experience.Feedly is one of the best ways around to organize, read, and share your content. Bookmark your favorite RSS feeds, throw them at Feedly and it’ll manage your reading experience from then on. Available as a browser Add-on, it works with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. For the roving reading fanatic, it’s also available on Google Play and in the Apple App Store. If you are looking for Feedly as an alternative, pay heed to Feedly Normandy: you’ll be able to migrate your RSS feeds seamlessly. Feedly also has a few handy tips to boot, which makes the switch a lot easier!
2. Reeder (Mac and iOS). For all the Mac fans, Reeder is one of the simplest, most elegant, and easy to use RSS management services available for Mac (also available for the iPhone and the iPad). It borrows much of the color cues, design elements, and even functionality from Apple. While it comes with standard RSS management features, it also has features that allow you to share your content on social media platforms. You can also save your feeds on Instapaper, ReaditLater, Evernote, and Readability.
3. Newsblur. Newsblur has an interface much like the beloved Google Reader, so offers the aspect of familiarity. Its demo video can confuse you, but it’s certainly a good reader option for importing your previous RSS feeds and managing your feeds from here on out. Newsblur features availability on the web, smartphones and tablets. It also provides real-time RSS, “In context reading”, share stories, and it even trains itself (with your help) to hide content you don’t want to read. A few restrictions are in order: the free account does have a few restrictions such as site limits (64 for free account and unlimited for premium account). Free accounts are also limited to 10 stories at a time, public shares, and site updates reach you just once during the day.
4. NetVibes. “Dashboard everything” goes the tagline for NetVibes and it almost comes close to a Google-like experience. Although it’s meant to be more of a “tuning in” and “listening” to brand whispers and corporate sweet nothings, it also has “personal” RSS feed management. NetVibes brings everything that matters to you in a single dashboard-like setting and it even features an iGoogle page, according to Whitson Gordon from Lifehacker.
5. Pulse. Pulse wasn’t meant to be here, but it’s the underdog that deserves a mention since it looks refreshingly good, largely visual, and is available to pull your feeds to iOS, Android, and the web. Pulse is stunning, practical, easy, and completely free to use. It has dedicated apps for mobile phones and tablets and it’s been around for a while.

One other notable mention should be Flipboard for iPhone and iPad (although it’s more like a reader where you discover content and not necessarily add your own RSS feeds). It’s feeds are limited to an inventory of websites (that Flipboard makes available) and your feeds are limited to just as many slots available, which is fairly abysmal. Flipboard seems to work better (or perhaps exclusively) on mobile devices and not so much on the web – the turf Google Reader used to dominate.

So, as Google Reader leaves the scene, what’s your poison going to be? What service are you going to use for your RSS management?

The post Google Reader On Death Bed: 5 Best Google Reader Alternatives To Consider appeared first on Small Business Technology.

Ramon Ray, Editor & Technology Evangelist, Smallbiztechnology.com
http://www.twitter.com/ramonray | http://www.facebook.com/smallbiztechnology
[email protected]

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