I stopped reading RSS feeds way back before Google decided to kill its Google Reader service. I haven’t been a huge RSS reader since Bloglines closed down over two years ago. Of course, my career hasn’t been dependant on curating news and information like it used to be, so the loss of these services haven’t really had an effect on my life and livelihood, but I do feel for those that were fans of the service.

I had long hoped someone would come out with an open source version of Bloglines that would let me continue to use the interface I had become accustomed to on a server I maintained and managed, but that never came to pass, and I don’t think Google Reader users are going to see anything exactly the same as what they are going to have to leave behind.

There have been many companies rushing in to fill the void as hundreds of thousands of people are left without a way to basically build their own newspapers online of their favourite blogs and websites.

Feedly, once just a pretty layer on top of your Google Reader subscriptions, has built their own in-house RSS reader application so that you can transition away from Google Reader easily, and have a nice looking feed, and it is probably the one I would recommend the highest at this point, especially if you are currently a Google Reader user.

Lately, because of the time I’ve been spending with Annie and her family, I haven’t had the time I used to have to peruse the news, and I’ve been thinking about getting set back up with RSS feeds so that news comes to me, instead of hunting it down on my dozen favourite sites, and Feedly is probably where I’ll go.

At the end of the day though, how can anyone trust services if even a company as large as Google closes down something with more than a few hundred thousand users?

I would suggest that desktop software is the way to go because even if they don’t update the software, you can still use it, but I don’t know of any that syncs feeds among installs and syncs read/unread and I want to have my RSS work fine on multiple computers.