Google Reader is dying, and I'm keeping my feeds

So Google is killing Reader. Last Wednesday’s “spring cleaning” announcement, shutting down July 1st. I’ve used it pretty much every day since 2006, and I’m a little embarrassed by how much this annoys me.

Reader is the only Google product that’s actually part of how I think. Every morning I go through a few hundred items from ~150 feeds: programmer blogs, a couple of security lists, some research groups, and a lot of personal sites that post once every few months but are always worth it when they do. People keep telling me Twitter replaced RSS. It didn’t. Twitter is a firehose, it forgets, and I’m not supposed to read every tweet. Reader is a queue, things wait for me.

Anyway. Step one, before you do anything else, go to Google Takeout and export your Reader data. You get an OPML file with all your subscriptions plus JSON of your starred items. The OPML is the important bit, every feed reader on the planet can import it.

Where I’ve been poking around this week:

• Feedly - the obvious one, syncs with your Reader account today and says the switch to its own backend will be invisible. Apparently it picked up half a million users in two days. Too magazine-y for me but the list view is ok.
• NewsBlur - small, independent, mostly paid, open source. Melting under the load right now, understandably. I like that I can see the business model (it’s me paying).
• The Old Reader - a clone of Reader from before the 2011 redesign. Some of you will love it.
• Tiny Tiny RSS - PHP, self-hosted, runs on any cheap VPS. This is probably where I end up.

Digg says it’s building one too, so expect a dozen more by the summer. Honestly, that’s the one good thing here. Free-and-good-enough Reader basically froze this whole category for years.

Export your OPML today and keep a copy somewhere that isn’t Google.