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Comment by Jleagle | Hacker News Reader

Don't understand why more people are not just sticking with Google Reader until it closes instead of switching now.

If you rely on Google Reader for your daily workflow, figuring out which service or application is a suitable alternative after Reader closes is too late. Unless you're hoping for a 180 from Google, which there's no evidence to support right now, waiting just cuts the amount of time you can use to test the alternatives while still having access to Google Reader as a fallback.

One good reason is that the RSS reader landscape is going to change drastically in the coming months as other developers jump to fill the hole left by Reader. The app you end up using may not even exist yet. Sure, the cost of switching is low, but it still seems like a waste of time to start searching now when so much will change in the next 3 months.

If you're sure the app you'll end up using hasn't been made public yet and the current alternatives are not going to do it for you, that's a risk you can take, definitely: but it's still a heck of a risk if Reader is integral to what you do online. At any rate, I don't think it's that hard to understand why thousands of people are already making contingency plans this far out.

Trying things out might teach you the sort of things you do and don't like in a reader. If all you've ever used is Google Reader then you might discover new preferences by being exposed to other solutions.

You still have to switch soon, so you might as well put in a little extra time. At least, that's my thinking on it right now.

On the other hand, waiting maximizes the amount of time I can continue to be productive while you more eager people test out the alternatives for me.

If I had more time, I'd definitely try a bunch of things. But for now I'm glad that there are a bunch of eager types out there testing the alternatives and posting here.

I wouldn't wait until it closes, but I am more than happy to wait until others run around testing out these other services, and we see what comes out of that.

because i don't need this in the back of my mind

my feed reader needs to be as invisible to me as possible, i just want to read the content

Why stick with dying app that will never see a new feature and which may make your data inaccessible at any time? I exported my data and will never see it again. Anything else and I might have tried to log in one day and suddenly hit the deadline. The odds of me ever entering hundreds of sites into any app of Google's again are also far lower now.

Has Google ever gone back on a publicly promised shutdown date and shut something down early?

I am sticking with it because there is a rush on every other service. At the same time I am also looking. If you are on Firefox (I'm not as of yet) than the closest you can come to GR experience is installing the Brief add-on. However, your feeds would be on local storage though you'd be using a browser interface.

Every time I use google reader now is tainted by sadness. Also it is useful to be able to compare side by side.

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