Transitioning From Google Reader

Just some quick thoughts. Here are the services I’m looking at as replacements:

• NewsBlur – Seems pretty quick and full-featured and there’s a social commenting aspect that looks similar to Google Reader of days gone by, but the site has this Java-y non-native feel to it that I don’t like. The interface feels busy, but it might be something that I’ll appreciate for its utility later.
• NetVibes – I tried NetVibes several years ago when I thought that having a personal web portal (or whatever they were called) would be an awesome thing and I wasn’t particularly impressed. The RSS reader seems a bit barebones, but it’s decently quick. It feels more non-nativey than NewsBlur, but doesn’t appear to have the social features or many features at all.
• Prismatic – This might make a good tool for finding the latest news in groups of feeds that I don’t care to read completely, but it seems too magazine-ish for keeping track of sites where I read every post of that don’t post often and I have Flipboard for that.
• The Old Reader – A clone of Google Reader before the social features were stripped out. Looks promising, but has been down more than up since I started trying to use it so I can’t say for sure yet.
• Fever – I almost bought this right when it came out. I like idea of their approach to sorting, and Fever already integrates with Reeder (my RSS app of choice on Mac, iPad, and iPhone), but I’m a tiny bit wary of having to maintain my own installation of it. Costs $30 which is cheap as long as I end up using it.
• Feedly – Looks pretty and I like the versatility of the different web views and the iOS app is really slick. It’s not super intuitive for someone who’s expecting a classic RSS or email interface, but I don’t mind learning a bit. Sharing options look nice.
• NetNewsWire – I’ve tried this app multiple times over the course of many years along with apps like Shrook, NewsFire, Vienna, and I feel like there was one called NewsGator? But I never stick with it. I don’t really want to replace Reeder as my go-to native client.
• Flipboard – I love Flipboard for browsing through high-volume feeds, but I never transitioned into using it for my main reads. I don’t think it’s really built for that.
• I hope HiveMined ships soon so I can check that out, but it’s been a long time coming.

What’s likely to happen is that I’ll just jump on board with whoever Reeder builds-in support for. Right now that means Fever, but that only works on the iPhone app at the moment. Maybe as part of this transition I’ll offload some of my high-volume stuff into Flipboard and trim down my 130+ feeds. Otherwise, whatever holds the status quo will probably make me happy.

I will say that I very honestly miss the social functions in Google Reader. If someone manages to recreate that inside of a quality RSS reader (and I can get the right friends to use it), they will have my attention and my money).