The Death of Google Reader

Wargaming is not a hobby that gets a lot of popular exposure. Certainly there are a handful of magazines that come out on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, and TMP serves up its share of news and grumbling, but I found following blogs the most enjoyable way of getting quick nuggets of the hobby by people who were excited about it. I relied on Google Reader to manage the dozens of feeds I follow, and browsed them via the iphone and ipad app Flipboard. After a stressful day at work, one of my favorite moments of the evening was just sitting down and flipping through the photos and posts in Flipboard.

 And then Google killed reader.

 I've loved Google for a decade. I use Gmail and Blogger, prefer Google+ to Facebook, love their maps, and used Reader daily. Google killed some of their projects before, like Google Wave, but they were never services I did more than dabble with. Google killing Reader was a real watershed moment for me, when Google killed something that was a large part of my life. My love for Google has absolutely soured, much in the same way my love for Netflix evaporated after they tried to separate and kill their DVD mail service. It feels like a betrayal of trust, where the love I had for their product was not reciprocated. I am seriously rethinking how much I want to invest into relying on any one company, especially one that doesn't deliver actual products but only access to their cloud. What's next, Blogger? 

My Flipboard blog feed

Luckily my preferred feed reader, Flipboard, is automatically importing my Google Reader bookmarks, so I should have access to all of my blog feeds after July 1st. I don't want to be left flat footed in case Flipboard pulls a similar stunt, so I've been looking for a backup RSS aggregator to handle all of my blog feeds. A lot of folks are in the same situation, and based on the votes on replacereader . I'm trying out Feedly. I'm not quite sure how to cross pollinate Flipboard and Feedly with new feeds other than adding it manually to each, but hopefully that will work itself out.

 Have you found a Google Reader replacement? Which do you prefer?