UKC

I've been using Google Reader to keep up to date with various blogs and websites and found it useful as a time saver to avoid having to check multiple websites for updates all the time. Now Google say they are discontinuing it in a couple of months, so can anyone recommend a good alternative?

In reply to Jonathan: My first thought on hearing this was absolute rage - it's become a key part of my workflow (keeping up with scientific literature) - of course, I shouldn't rely on something like that so heavily...

Anyway, I'm thinking of moving to Mozilla Thunderbird. Problem is is that it's a desktop client, so I'll have to have two accounts - one at work with the literature, one at home for the blogs and webcomics. I shall be following this thread with interest!

In reply to Jonathan:

Feedly (http://www.feedly.com/ ) seems to have taken up some or most of the slack. Not used it myself yet but will need to do some migration shortly

ALC

In reply to Jonathan:

i mainly use net news wire on my macbook and feeddler on the phone if that helps.

my main gripe is that some blogs only seem to show the first few lines of text in NNW thus requiring my to open the post in my browser anyway....is this an issue with the app itself or are some blogs just set up that way to generate more page visits?

In reply to Jonathan: I've been looking for alternatives, both for Google Reader (used to keep up with new publications) and also iGoogle which I've been using as my home page both at home & work for a while with 'gadgets' for eg mail, Google reader, news, weather etc. There do appear to be several options & I'll no doubt move sooner or later but do wonder why Google are doing this.

And while on about Google, does anyone know a good alternative to Google Scholar ?

In reply to a lakeland climber:
I've just migrated to Feedly and the process is very easy--it's basically one click migration from Google Reader. The layout is different but I'm sure it will be easy to get used to!

In reply to Only a hill:

I use flipboard on the iPad and apparently if you have set it up to use Google Reader then the migration will happen automatically!

ALC

In reply to a lakeland climber:
Really?! I use Flip board so will check it out--if so that's brilliant!

In reply to Only a hill:

According to this, yes - http://inside.flipboard.com/2013/03/14/weve-got-your-rss-covered-save-your-...

ALC

Thanks all for the responses so far, will check out the options suggested.

In reply to Doug: I too wonder why they're doing this, they're a massive company and can surely maintain these things with a trivial amount of effort?

I might be able to help with alternatives to Google Scholar -what sort of thing are you using it for? How about pubmed, web of science, scopus etc? They all work reasonably well for me.

I actually think they must be investing in Scholar since it has got a lot better over the last 18 months or so. It used to be useless but is starting to become my first point of call for academic searches, and the profiles have been quite popular too. It's also good for monitoring citations to your own papers.

In reply to Jonathan:

Doug / Jonathan:

From Google:

"There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience."

http://googlereader.blogspot.co.uk/

I'd imagine it costs a lot more than you might think to keep it running. RSS isn't trendy any more and silicon valley is obsessed with new and trendy. So they're dumping it.

In reply to Jonathan: Feedly is currently getting most votes on here - http://www.replacereader.com/

In reply to Jonathan: Web of Science only seems to include papers once the printed version is available, whereas Google Scholar picks up the 'early on line' style publications, Google is also much better with 'grey literature' which is important in my field (conservation biology). Scopus seems good but I don't have access other than when I get temporary access when reviewing a paper for an associated journal, maybe I should look at pubmed but thought it was mostly medicine related.

Until recently I was happy with Google Scholar but they keep making changes which annoy me- mostly trivial (eg max number of records is now 20 rather than 100) but enough to make me think of looking for alternatives.

In reply to Jonathan: I rather like....

www.feedly.com

but I suspect that there will be lots of other companies coming out of the woodwork with readers RSN.

In reply to Doug:

This is why I'm so annoyed about the disappearance of Reader - I get my articles ASAP through the RSS feeds provided by the journals (at least all the ones I care about do this), and then the WoS citation alert two months later reminds me to update my bibtex file to replace the ASAP fields!

In reply to David Ponting: p.s. this might be worth a try; don't know what threshold of outrage would cause google to change its mind, though...

https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-running

In reply to David Ponting:
Nothing will change Google mind from what I've been reading as its death has been on the cards for a few years with at least a couple of near death experiences.... its all about Google taking on Facebook apparently. Social is where its at and for Google that means moving everything and everyone to Google+ Reader is apparently a niche product for geeks Google+ is for everyone.

In reply to Jonathan: Just looked at PubMed, a search for "habitats directive" gets 15 returns, compared to 297 for Web of Science & 'About 12,300' for Google Scholar

Couple of other searches were similar so guess I won't be using PubMed as an alternative

In reply to Indy: the whole moving-to-google+ business is really annoying for end-users, apart from being completely futile (i.e. google+ will never reach the breadth of userbase of facebook). For example, they took picasa, which used to be a very good online photo store, and "integrated" that into google plus. By integrated I mean took the existing functionality, stripped it down, slapped google+ logos and references everywhere. For example, when viewing photos in a browser (chrome/IE/etc), half the screen is now taken up by completely useless user comments tabs, similar to FB, only the comments stay forever empty because no-one really uses google+ in the way people do with FB. Google just got greedy with this whole push for social networks, imho, greedy and stupid.