It’s so hard to let go of Google Reader

One of the biggest tech news in recent weeks was the death of Google Reader.

As a long time user of Google Reader, this news was not only shocking but also caused panic because Google Reader has been a huge part of my work flow.

Last few years, Google Reader has been my only source of news, and saved me a huge amount of time by allowing me to visit one site instead of multiple sites for the latest news.

I understand that Google Reader hasn't been making money for Google but I’m sure it provided them what people are reading and what’s trending.

It seems that Google is pushing people to use Google+ and Google Currents because they have business strategies for them unlike Google Reader but they definitely can’t replace Google Reader for several reasons.

1. Platform independent : There are NO other services that provides supports for ALL platforms seamlessly like Google Reader. There are apps for all mobile platforms, and strong web service which makes it OS-independent. All read and unread articles get synced across all platforms in real-time which makes it breeze for someone who uses many different devices to consume news.

2. Speed : One of the biggest advantage of Google Reader was speed. All articles gets synced across all platforms like I mentioned before, and new articles get added/updated in real-time. It also allows users to skim through articles and read only what interests them. The biggest problem with other services like Flipboard, Currents and Feedly is that it takes long time to consume all the info I get everyday.

3. Free : Many people criticized Google Reader when Google first started this service because it provided a great RSS reader for free and killed all the other services which were not free at the time. Now Google Reader is gone, and I may have to pay for the services I've been using for free for a long time. I actually have no problem with this but I’m just afraid that if there will be a service that can match the convenience that Google Reader has been providing.

Some people say that RSS is dead and some people say this is actually good for RSS because this will allow people to innovate RSS more. They may be right but I still haven’t found an efficient way to consume news when Google Reader is gone. Twitter or Google+ may be the way to go but there are too many distractions, and it may take a very long time to curate the sources of the news I want.

I've been a huge Google fan and in my opinion, this is a very bad move by them. I’m sure that there are less users of Google Reader than Google+ or Gmail but I’m sure they are aware that this has been an essential service for lots of people. I just hope that I find a replacement before it dies on July 1.