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Friday, July 05, 2013

Digg Reader as Google Reader replacement is disappointing

Cute slow loris by snowflakegirl from flickr (CC-BY)

Since Feedly disappointed me I gave Digg Reader a try. In case everybody forgot already, Digg used to be something like Reddit, except with much more frequent corporate-driven redesigns - and one too many of them killed the site. Meanwhile Reddit is getting more popular than ever proving that simply not breaking what's working in corporate redesign spree gives you a lot of competitive advantage.

Anyway, Digg Reader is currently completely unusable:
  • There's no "Show only unread items" mode. Seriously.
  • Items are ordered by their timestamp, not time of arrival on the list - so they routinely arrive on page 2 or 3.
  • To make matters worse, Digg Reader doesn't update as often as Google Reader, so arriving way down is a pretty common problem. And even if that wasn't a problem low update frequency is just very annoying.
  • There aren't even any counts of unread items per feed.
I expect they'll fix these issues someday, but for now it's literally unusable, and I'll be testing another RSS reader next. Probably expect a few more posts like that in the future.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Feedly seems to be the best replacement so far. They have improved a lot in last few months. When I tried it just after Google announced Reader's death it was barely useful. Right now it's quite OK.

It's mobile version sucks big time, luckily iPhone Reeder already supports Feedly as synchronization service. I'm still waiting for Mac Reeder supporting it though.

taw said...

Łukasz Piestrzeniewicz: I've been looking for something that works in-browser, since many things I follow are link-heavy blogs, and having separate app for rss reader and then going to browser for all the links and back doesn't work too well (on a phone).

Anonymous said...

i know its crazy but AOL reader is my top choice right now. try and forget that its AOL and give it a shot.

here are some honorable mentions (besides Digg)

FeedSpot - almost perfect except it seems slow to pull in new items

TheOldreader - a little slow to pull new items, wont let me sort my feeds the way i want (folders on top)

NewsVibe - expanded view sucks, doesnt have mark as read when scrolling

CommaFeed - never imported all my feeds.....

vnny 7-11-13