I’m getting a kick out of reading the stories from the Google Reader competitors reacting to the shutdown announcement. Google’s dwindling number of users appears to be counted in millions, which is a great many for almost any other entity. Feedly and NewsBlur seem to be the dominant destinations for reader refugees.
Feedly reports 500,000 new subscribers in the 48 hours following the announcement, and ordering 10 times their current bandwidth allocation.
NewsBlur, which is a one-man-show, had all kinds of excitement – they blew up their host, their mail provider, and unusually positive interaction from PayPal.
I’m happy enough with TinyTinyRSS, but NewsBlur was distinctly a close second – Newsblur is attractive (in terms of design, model, and UI), open source (Under an MIT licence), and supports self-hosted instances, but is seriously complicated to set up, by the author’s own admission – I tried on a VM, and decided that for now ttrss is a better choice.
They both seem to be excited more than anything, which is consistent with the reaction I’ve been seeing with the TTRSS developer (also a small pet project) and community – the shakeup could well provide some nice selective pressure for the RSS ecosystem.
(Posting here because I’m done with putting up with google’s failings – Plus doesn’t handle multiple links well, and I have no desire to fight with it).
