On the Eve of the Feedpocalypse

Remember the news that Google Reader was going to shut down? Well, the end is nigh. July 1 is the feed rapture. I went over some options in my previous post on the topic, but it’s worth checking in to see where everyone stands.

Feedly seems to be the majority choice, touting that “more than 3,000,000 Google Reader users have switched to feedly”. They just announced Feedly Cloud, which is “a fast and scalable infrastructure to seamlessly replace Google Reader”. The good news for Reeder users is that Reeder and feedly will soon work together. The bad news for some of us is: like google reader, feedly’s business model is not clear. In this interview, the CEO says:

Our business model has both short-term and longer-term revenue sources. Feedly revenue today is derived from user content discovery and product discovery. Additional revenue channels will be introduced over time.

So, who knows. It sounds vaguely suspicious, but I’m not great at parsing tech CEO-speak. It is interesting to note that Feedly already had 4 million users so the RSS market is at least 7 million strong – Google said it wasn’t worth it for them because it was only a million. YOU LIE!!

Here are some other ones: NewsBlur, The Old Reader, Feed Wrangler, and FeedBin. Reeder supports FeedBin now and soon Feed Wrangler as well. Feedbin looks the prettiest to my eyes but I haven’t looked at these very hard – I’m going to give Fever another shot first, and if that doesn’t work, I may give these other options a better sizing up.

UPDATE: Just saw this article about Digg’s news reader via waxy who says it launches this weekend.