Alas, July 1st has come and gone, and with it so has Google Reader. An admitted addict, I had finally gotten a bit of control over my habit when Google decided to pull the plug. I had held out hope that they would reconsider, but I finally decided over last weekend that I had better try out a couple of new services.

I decided to look at three alternatives.

1. The Digg Reader
   I figured I’d give the new Digg Reader a try since they had made a lot of waves in the tech press and appear to be serious about offering a long-term replacement. I ported my feeds over and gave it a try over the weekend. I came away less than impressed. There are too many missing features, such as remaining article count as well as the fact that articles still show up in the list after they’ve been read. I was also a bit frustrated that I could not change the order of the articles. They were always showing newest first, whereas I like to read my feed oldest first. 

   I’m not going to give up completely on the Digg reader, but I’ve put it on the shelf for now and will give it another go after it matures a bit.

2. Feedly
   I had used Feedly when it first came out and quickly dumped it in favor of Reader. I was very hesitant to go back, but it appeared to be the popular choice, so I figured I’d give it a try after striking out with Digg Reader.I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised. They’ve made a lot of improvement to Feedly, have provided a lot more reading options such as article view, list view, magazine view, and cards view. They’ve also done a much better job of organizing feeds and showing unread article counts. The performance appears to be better than what I remember, too. As an added touch, they’ve also incorporated quite a few of the Reader shortcuts into the product, at least the ones I use a lot.

   It’s not Google Reader, but it’s close enough. I’m going to give Feedly a try for now.

3. Tiny Tiny RSS
   My third choice is Tiny Tiny RSS. I haven’t gotten around to giving it a spin as it requires a lot more setup work. I’m going to keep it on my list of reader options should I get frustrated with either Feedly or Digg Reader.

I’m certainly going to miss Google Reader, as are many other people. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, I don’t have the time or coding chops to pull off what this individual did in creating his own alternative to Google Reader.

By the way, if you use Reader and haven’t exported your feeds using Google Takeout, you had better get hopping. After July 15, Google says they are deleting all Reader data. Given the way they worded their going away message, I’d say they’re serious about it.