RIP Google Reader

I knew this day would eventually come, but I had myself fooled into thinking it would be long after something superior came out to take its place.  Google announced that they’ll be discontinuing Reader in July.  This is pretty heartbreaking to me, because I follow nearly 600 different blogs and news sources.  Google Reader is my most browsed-to website.  It’s constantly available in a browser tab and I use it to stay on top of the news.  This has relevance to me on a number of levels:

• For work, I stay on top of the latest trends in things like iOS and Facebook marketing, competitor game releases, press releases, and all the news in social gaming and technology.
• For The Border House, I subscribe to tons of quality blogs that post feminist content in gaming and it’s a major source of my inspiration and linkiness.
• For pleasure, I follow many MMO and general gaming blogs along with other topics of interest (such as cooking, personal blogs, fashion, fitness, etc.) and Google Reader helps keep it all organized for me.

There are a number of replacements I’ve been researching, most of which are down due to being hammered with traffic after today’s news.  The two most promising are NewsBlur and Feedly.  It’s important for me that whichever service I migrate to has cross platform functionality, as I switch back and forth between my gaming PC, my Macbook, my iPhone, and my iPad on a regular basis.  Last time I tried Feedly it was a bit too visual for me — I like my RSS reader to be clean and neat and easy to scan for headlines that might interest me.

If anyone has any other suggestions, lay them on me!  Right now I feel like I’m preparing for a funeral of a dear friend, which is a sad analogy, but Google Reader has been a part of my daily habits since 2006 at the earliest.  I will be sad to see it go.