Google Reader Going Away

Have you heard the news? Yesterday, Google announced that they are taking Google Reader away.  You can read their brief announcement here, on their Official Google Reader blog.   To find out what other Google services are being axed during their second spring cleaning, head on over to this post to read more.   What does this new mean for you?  Absolutely nothing if you don’t use Google Reader.  If you do use Google Reader, it means you’re going to have to make some decisions about whether or not you want to switch to a new reader, or if you want to follow your favorite blogs in new ways.

There are plenty of other options out there for following along with your favorite blogs.  If RSS is the way you want to stick with, there are a couple of options other than refollowing all your favorites in a different reader.  Feedly is the one I went with.  It was quick and simple to switch the feeds over, I just signed in using my Google account, (the same one I used for my Google Reader account) and it’s all set up for me.  Read this post for more info from the folks at Feedly.  Aside from the quick and easy set up, Feedly has an App for Android, which was really important to me since I now seem to do most of my blog reading on my phone.  Another great alternative is Bloglovin’.  I have no personal experience with this one, but here is a great article from the peeps from the Bloglovin’ blog, to walk you through the switch.

RSS feeds aren’t the only way to follow your favorite blogs though.  Many of the blogs I read and follow offer an option to follow via email, which usually means each new posts is delivered straight into your inbox!  And let’s not forget the plethora of social media platforms out there.  Social Media has become a HUGE part of blogging.  I can only speak for myself, but I link each new post I publish here on the blog to what I call the BIG THREE social media sites, Google +, Facebook, and Twitter.  If the post has printables, I’ll ‘pin’ them to my Pinterest board, but for the most part I just use the BIG THREE, so if you follow on one of those, you don’t have to worry about missing a post.

I’m not sure if Google Reader going away is going to be a good thing or not.  Despite the fact that I migrated to WordPress from Blogger, I am a huge Google fan.  So it saddens me to see a great service go away, on the other hand, I’m excited to see where they’re going to put that extra time and energy, and though this ‘Spring Clean’ that Googles is undergoing is causing some confusion and grumpiness, I think overall, it will be a good thing.  Only time will tell for certain though.

What are your thoughts on this?  Are you for or against it?  Any thoughts on what the next service to go might be?