On Feedly

Feedly has billed itself as a replacement for Google Reader in recent weeks. After Google's announcement that their service would be shutting down in July Feedly  jumped into the conversation almost immediately, announcing that they would be releasing their own replacement and transitioning Google Reader users to their own Project Normandy once Reader closed down.

The quality of Feedly's back-end is impossible to determine at this time, but their user interface bears exploration as Reader users prepare for a transition.

Feedly follows many of the current trends in app design as they strive for "digital authenticity" (a term describing the move towards the elimination of textured interfaces and shaded 'buttons'). The app includes a "hamburger button" (Twitter), two "basements" (anti-basement Tumblr post), and a flat, card-based interface that are all becoming quite familiar.

As important as design is, it does not make a good app on it's own, and Feedly provides several features to supplement it's design. Sign-in is accomplished via Google credentials. It is possible to open the app and begin adding sources, but in order to sync sources across devices a Google account will be required.

By default the start screen is "Today" section. This section is a magazine-style layout similar to Flipboard (with a slide page transition rather than a flip). "Today" presents content from subscribed feeds in a "featured" section and pulls the most popular content from the subscribed feeds and organizes it by it's user assigned category. Like most functions of Feedly, the start screen is customizable and can be changed to the "All" screen (all content grouped in chronological order) or the "Must Reads" (content from sources that the user has marked as such).

The customization of the reading experience continues in with the ability to set the default mode for how the feeds are displayed. The modes include a full page mode with the title superimposed over the cover image, list mode with thumbnails and title side by side, and list mode with no images. From the list of articles the user can make a short swipe left on an article to mark it as "read", a long swipe left to mark all articles on that page as "read", as well as swiping to the right to mark articles as "unread".

Feedly also includes a "Saved for Later" category that the user populates by tapping a bookmark shaped button while reading articles. The function is similar to starring items in Reader. This is not the only way to save articles for later, however. Feedly also includes the ability to share to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pocket, bit.ly, Instapaper, and email from within the article. The app also allows a user to select favorite read-later, social, and browser services that are then placed in the top bar of the app rather than behind a menu button.

These aspects of Feedly are a brief glimpse into the customization available to the user. The app provides the ability to build the news reading app best suited to the users reading habits with a modicum of effort. While there is no way to account for every user's tastes, Feedly does a comprehensive job of including the most often used features used by news readers. The app will also be moving to a freemium model (Tech Crunch) that will include more features geared towards heavy users in the pay version. The app has seen massive adoption over the last few weeks with good reason and makes a strong case for a one stop replacement for Google Reader.

On Making Sense of the Maelstrom

Google's announcement that it would be closing down the Google Reader project has provided some terrific insight into the tech news industry as a whole. It will be interesting some day to look back at the data that has been posted online in the form of blogs, comments, and articles. In a couple of years the dust will settle and some interesting studies can be performed on the death of a web tool. In the meantime one can try to make some sense of the maelstrom.

One of the consistent themes surrounding the demise of Google Reader is the idea that Google was providing a back end service to a number of clients. This is intriguing for several reasons and we will explore several of them bellow. First, some background:

There were many users that navigated to the Reader webpage and consumed their news from the feed, but a large number of users linked their Google Reader feeds to a third party client to read their subscriptions. Mike McCue of Flipboard mentioned to Liz Gannes(All Things D) that 2 million users had linked Google Reader to their Flipboard accounts. If Flipboard/Google Reader crossover alone is so high, one can imagine the number  of users that have connected via other clients.

This has become a problem for Google. In the past few years, Google has made it inconvenient for one to connect external clients to any of its services, at least if the service needs to work everywhere. Mail clients are available on various platforms, but IMAP on a desktop/mobile client combination does not offer the same functionality as using Google's Gmail web client in Chrome and the Gmail app on iOS. Rather than limit what third party clients can access in Gmail, Google has created an environment in which their native apps are superior to other options.

The same is not true of Google Currents. Google decided to not offer APIs at all for that service and it is not hard to imagine Currents getting the "spring-cleaning" treatment. Currents is, after all, Reader's closest direct successor. Google+ and Google Calendar are in similar positions, in some ways, as Google Reader, but they form a part of the core experience offered by Android, and should not suffer the same fate.

All this to say: Google killed Reader because Google is not in the business of providing back end services to other companies. Amazon does that, and does it well, but Google wants to be a consumer services company. Google wants to take action on the data it collects and capitalize on the data through advertising. Why should Google send all of its data to any app that feels like plugging in? Other companies were taking great advantage of a service Google was providing, and doing so at Google's expense. Google is not in the business of providing services to third party developers; it provides services to consumers.

It is frustrating to have a product that one knows and loves yanked away, but Google Reader was not serving a function in line with Google's core business. Services that are in line with Google's goals are quite safe. Google Keep provides note taking ability that was a glaring omission from Android (do not try to replace Evernote with them, that leads to anger, fear, aggression, but copy and paste your content out of that tiny Tasks window in Gmail into a full screen Keep tab and close that piece of tasks garbage forever). Calendar is also a central core of Android, and Google+ provides a much need social angle for the company.

Google provides useful services at a small cost (tiny ads on the side of the screen) and there is no reason to avoid using those services unless one is sensitive to privacy concerns or does not like the way the services or interfaces work. Google always provides a way out of its services if the terms become to unbearable or it closes down a project through its Data Liberation project. In short, do not let the Google Reader shutdown ruin your digital life.

On Lots of News

A lot of things happened yesterday, here's a quick update of some of the highlights. A big update will be posted after the Samsung event tonight.

 Andy Rubin stepped down as head of Android to be replaced by Sundar Pichai. Here's the Google Blog post and here is Andy Rubin's post about halfway down in a post on SlashGear.

 Google announced that they would be shuttering the Google Reader service. Here's the Google Blog post and a post from Wired describing the run up to it.

 New Pope.

 Phil Schiller dissed Android and everyone is upset about it. Here is the iMore post who tends to be more reserved and here is a post from the WSJ who is in panic mode about Apple.