{"id":647314,"date":"2013-03-18T16:45:05","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T20:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betanews.com\/?p=137408"},"modified":"2013-03-18T16:45:05","modified_gmt":"2013-03-18T20:45:05","slug":"tales-from-a-google-reader-refugee-waiting-in-line-to-be-fed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/647314","title":{"rendered":"Tales from a Google Reader refugee — waiting in line to be fed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I will spare you all of the crying and griping about the whole Google Reader thing — you have heard it all by now. Suffice it to say that I no longer plan to trust Google with much of what I do. Other companies axe products, as I learned when Microsoft killed my beloved Live Mesh<\/a> last year, but Google is more regular and ruthless executioner, but I digress — I promised no rant here.<\/p>\n

My colleagues and I are discussing where we will all go after being chucked from Google lands into the jungle. There are a number of options, and Feedly is among the popular destinations. But I was not impressed in my, admittedly very short, look at the service. I also fired up Opera and imported my OPML file into its built-in RSS reader, but it’s not cloud-based, and I was left with more than 10,000 “unread” stories. Granted it can be fixed, but do I want to?<\/p>\n

In the end I settled on a very simple web-based solution called The Old Reader<\/a>. I would love to tell you how much I like service, how I recommend you move there immediately, but I fear I will not have those answers for days at this point. The road this refugee treads is a long one, and there are many more homeless in front of me anxious to be fed.<\/p>\n

My initial attempt to import my OPML file from Google Takeout resulted in a message that told me, rather matter-of-factly, that “There are 46,908 users in the import queue ahead of you”. That number was as of 9:41 AM ET this morning. As of this writing — more than six hours later — I have moved up quite a ways. The site now tells me that “There are\u00a035,296\u00a0users in the import queue ahead of you”. I figure I should be in sometime around the end of this week, perhaps sooner if I get lucky.<\/p>\n

Its not the fault of the service. I am pretty sure that Google warned no partners ahead of its Spring Cleaning announcement that suddenly sent a tsunami of traffic the way of these third-party services. All of them scramble for bandwidth and more servers. I suppose it’s a good problem for a business to have, although most would have been well-served with a warning about the mass of refugees coming their way.<\/p>\n

Thankfully we all have until July 1 to get this sorted out. There is time to try multiple services and pick a favorite and there is time for the app makers to get up to speed with their new-found popularity. It just begs the question, once again, what Google’s powers-that-be are thinking in making this move. There is obviously a business here, and the biggest Internet company in the world failed to find a way to capitalize on it.<\/p>\n

Photo Credit:<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0Scott Maxwell \/ LuMaxArt<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I will spare you all of the crying and griping about the whole Google Reader thing — you have heard it all by now. Suffice it to say that I no longer plan to trust Google with much of what I do. Other companies axe products, as I learned when Microsoft killed my beloved Live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}