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More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

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Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#81
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Misleading" in the sense that only a fraction of those may become loyal Feedly users, sure. But it seems like a pretty good estimate of the number of active and aggrieved Google Reader users out there.

A good lower limit. Not everyone has the time or inclination to take immediate action. I'm a heavy user of Google Reader and I haven't yet taken an action. I probably won't for at least a few weeks. What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

>What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

Or even just open source it and get some positive PR to offset the negative they've been getting.

Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good lower limit. Not everyone has the time or inclination to take immediate action. I'm a heavy user of Google Reader and I haven't yet taken an action. I probably won't for at least a few weeks. What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

>What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users. Or even just open source it and get some positive PR to offset the negative they've been getting.

This probably won't help. Google projects are typically built to run on their very specific infrastructure. It's unlikely that an open sourced version would be viable outside of Google. It's always possible though.

Maybe they could release a version that would run on AppEngine and customers could just pay for their own or something.

Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#83

Of course! This seems to be the most recommended substitute, my question is why? Is it really that much better than the rest?

NewsBlur was a kludge when it worked and let you add more than 12 feeds. And Feedly was prepared for Google announcing the Reader shutdown. NewsBlur could be a strong contender for the next exodus when Reader finally goes dark, but it has a long way to go.

The rest are a bit weird, mobile-only, or don't know what they're going to do when the Reader API they depend on shuts down.

Personally, I like Feedly's UX. It's like an evolution of Reader. It's much smoother, and has a magazine view for feeds where it makes sense.

Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#84
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Misleading" in the sense that only a fraction of those may become loyal Feedly users, sure. But it seems like a pretty good estimate of the number of active and aggrieved Google Reader users out there.

A good lower limit. Not everyone has the time or inclination to take immediate action. I'm a heavy user of Google Reader and I haven't yet taken an action. I probably won't for at least a few weeks. What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

Same here... I read all my news through Reeder on the iPad. I won't be taking action until I find out what services they plan to add to replace Google Reader.

Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#85
post #50

It scares me that they add 500,000 users and I don't understand how they make money. At this point I'd like to either pay for a service or use something self-hosted to make sure I don't have to go through a painful transition again.

They must be selling your info. Just look at the Chrome access: "Access your data on all websites" and "Access your tabs and browsing activity"

Are you really just going to defame a company based on nothing but the granularity of Chrome's extension permissions? That's not just irresponsible but downright malicious.

Any extension that interacts with webpages needs that permission. Even if it's just to add a button. Before you go accusing them of selling information about your web browsing, you could at least check if they collect that information in the first place. Which is easy, since a network inspector is built-in to Chrome, and Chrome extensions are just ZIP files you can open up to read the code inside.

Hint: They don't. The plugin inserts a share image into the page, and the image is embedded in the plugin, not hosted on Feedly's server. It creates no network requests at all, so there's no involuntary information passing happening.

Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#87
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or use something self-hosted Take a look at: http://www.feedafever.com Just installed it. Works just like Google Reader, with a few bonus features. I don't have to worry about being shut down anymore.

Until your favorite blogs realize that RSS is just a money sink and shut down their feeds, which is exactly what Google is subtly prophesying and no one seems to get.

Yahoo! Pipes solves that problem ;)

Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#88
post #77

So, nobody was using Google Reader anyway, declining numbers and so on, eh?

It's a question of scale. When a company has services with more than 400 million users, a stagnant half a million is not that great.

Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#89
post #34
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I instantly uninstalled it after I saw that as well. Shame, I liked feedly the most out of the alternatives.

You can turn that button off in preferences, it's really easy.

Too late, the extension has permission, a future update could change what it does.

Re: More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined Feedly in the past 48 hours

#90
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it adds a button to the bottom right of every web page. I immediately uninstalled when I learned this. Newsblur has no such shenanigans and is developed by a HNer.

Too bad Newsblur is pretty badly designed. I mean, there's a lot of bling, but it's completely confusing and sometimes ugly. Magic icons everywhere, wierd fonts -- two different dropdowns on each entry for god's sake. It looks like it was designed by someone who used their IDE as a template for the UI. As an example of far too clever UI: Just try and change your password -- it's bizarre that it has no confirmation at…

I had this impression aswell. For all the attention that Newsblur is getting, I found the interface to be rather disappointing; their demo turned me away pretty quickly.

Feedly looks great, but yeah, won't use it in exchange of all my data. Perhaps if they come up with a standalone web version.

The search continues for me in any case.

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