Google Reader is Dead*. Long live everything else.

I’m trialling Feedly at the moment.

The Feedly interface. Clean and minimalist. To a point. Which is followed by ads.

The good

Sign in via Google and all your feeds auto-magically transfer to Feedly.
The Feedly iphone app (and presumably its counterpart for Android devices) syncs everything across all my devices so I can read my feeds whenever, wherever

The bad

I can’t seem to alphabetise my feeds at the moment
Feedly lacks a Chrome bookmarklet – I’d like to just click something in the dropdown bookmark bar in Chrome to subscribe when I come across a blog I want to follow
The *($%&%feckin ads-they’re only at the very top right of the feed and disappear as you scroll but heck ads just make me wanna kick punch the perpetrator in the head-I used paid versions for all my apps because I can’t stand any ‘buy this sh*t’ messages encroaching on my peaceful existance (and if it’s well made then it’s worth paying for)

Keep scrolling and they disappear but that horrible advertisement aftertaste lingers..

I’ll be testing a couple of other web-based RSS aggregators over the coming week (in so much as Uni and social commitments will allow):

Google Currents-I don’t want to use this because I no longer feel Google deserves my time. Cutting off Reader while shitty things like Google plus and Orkut (don’t ask) still exist is just plain shite, I don’t care what their excuse is. I would’ve paid to keep using Reader, too bad that option was never on the table. However, I value functionality (and design) above all so if this works I’m ready to be pragmatic and eat a little crow.
Pulse: looks beautiful but I don’t know if I’m ready for magazine format yet. I subscribe to a lot of very different feeds and having all those disparate images crowded together magazine-style will just give me the heebiejeebies. I’m also worried it’ll be a b*tch to use on mobile devices (download allowance-wise).
Newsblur: Looks like the most promising of the non-Feedly set. $1 for the full version and it if works well I will jump on it ($12 a year for pain-free blog reading seems well worth the cost).
Flipboard: That dreaded magazine format again, combined with ‘social’ extras (I have a blog and I’m on twitter. I don’t need any more social interaction, particularly during reading time-I wanna read my stories in peace goddammit).
Netvibes: The website looks a tad too ‘oriented to attract business users‘-the cost for the ‘full deal’ supports that hypothesis. Givin’ this one a miss.

If you’re trying out any of these or know of other acceptable alternatives (yes I know bloglovin’ exists I’m just not a fan of the interface), give me a holler.

EDIT: Digg is building a Reader replacement. Please request feature requests and suggestions in the comments to that article or tweet them @digg.

And now for some light relief (video of some old movie of Hitler getting pissed off at getting his @$$ kicked by the Allied Forces with the Reader fiasco parodied over it-avoid if this sort of thing pisses you off. Or if you’re at work. I loved the two crying ladies. “Don’t worry he can still export the feed as an XML file“).

*As of July 2013.