When Google announced their stupid lame country marrying your cousin backward decision to axe Google Reader there was a mad frenzy to find the next replacement– Pulse! Old Reader! Feedly! NewsBlur! AOL (???WTF) FlipBoard!
I made a clear decision.
Do nothing. It was March, there was a ton of time to wait for the dust to settle, and frankly, I liked using Google Reader. I planned to be there until the bitter end (5 days away).
But I think I found it- I just got my invite today for Digg Reader… and for a few spins around, I like it. It was a quick click to authenticate and import from Google. I’d looked at Feedly, and its fine, but seems a bit more magaziny- and the sparse look of Digg is what I like about Google Reader- a way to glance quickly at headlines see what I have read, use keyboard shortcuts to move through items. I like the list view for my browsing…
(click for full size)
I do miss the feature of Google Reader to hide the name sof feeds with no new items. Maybe down the road.
It’s funny because this afternoon I downloaded the iPhone app thinking it might have reader built it, but it did not… the update just came out about an hour ago, and had everything in my feeds set up:
It has only limited share options (twitter.facebook in the web version) add in email for the iPhone one, but thats enough for me (for now).
The item view is nicely done on both web and iPhone:
(click to see full size)
I never was much of a “digg-er” before, it was the original (maybe) in the idea of upvoting content, which seems to have been surpassed by reddit. The idea is to mark content you find useful as you read it, and I’d guess that is what digg us hoping to harvest. They have a “Popular” view, which lists the items among all your feeds that others are digg-ing) the amount of digg-ness represented by the red dots in the right columns.
(see full size, click the image)
So you can still organize your feeds in folders. I like that I can order them the way I like (by dragging). And that order is saved in my mobile version. There is still no feature for bundling and resyndicating, but I can see that as a down the line items as well. There is a setting to make public RSS feeds for items you have saved (for reading later in tools like Readabiltiy, Instapaper)
http://digg.com/user/db5e9552b29b48bf9186412fe6c205ec/saved.rss
as well as what you have “dugg”:
http://digg.com/user/db5e9552b29b48bf9186412fe6c205ec/diggs.rss
I can see some potential there in a way of aggregating what other people are digg-ing (or saving).
I am sure some people will find things wrong or less desirable about Digg. Or what is lacking. Or that the idea again of relying on a third party to host this (and maybe one day stick us with a fee o shit it down). And I have not put it nearly through enough paces to see how it works.
But I am feeling less worried about Google’s turning the switch off on July 1. For now, I am Digging Digg. It was worth it not to jump so quickly (for me). I await other people telling me what is all wrong about Digg’s new reader/
It’s beta folks- they built this in 3 months, something that Google took years to hone (and one board meeting to chop).
Digg it- get your http://digg.com/reader
Updates June 27, 2013 Tracking issues asI digg more:
- There is no mean to edit the category a feed is assigned to— it looks like you can move items in and out of folders. But it’s not like a label, e.g. I cannot assign a feed to more than one category (not sure if I would need that). But its more like a file folder system than a tag one. It’s also not obvious to a new user that youc an drag and drop the feeds round.
- The iPhone version does not have an option for a pure text headline view. I like to scan by headlines, don’t always need the icons.
