Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The internet is overloaded with content. Even if you only set out to read the most important articles and watch the top videos, you'll never get done.

Just staying up-to-date and informed is a challenge. You have news to read, blogs to check, and YouTube hits you've got to watch. But instead of opening each site a half-dozen times a day, you can use an RSS app to curate your content automatically.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a file that most websites update with their newest blog posts, videos, deals and more, so you can "subscribe" to sites and have new content automatically pushed to you. Instead of checking the 40 websites you follow, you can just open an RSS reader app and see what's new on all of those sites together.

In the years since Google Reader died, a wide range of RSS feed reader apps have come and gone. Today, there are still a number of great RSS tools that are actively being improved, apps you can use to follow your favorite sites—from powerful crowd favorites like Feedly to simple Chrome extensions like Feeder. Whether you want a simple app for consuming news on the go, or a powerful tool that archives the best content from hundreds of sites, there's an app here for you.

Could we be seeing a resurgence in RSS readers in the wake of Google Reader's demise?A quick addendum to last night's post - a quick cut of the analytics data from my blog shows Feedly and the Old Reader emerging as growing referrers over the last couple of weeks.I am really enjoying seeing the range of readers emerge as Google Reader winds down. There are some, like Bloglovin' which seems to target and promote the idea of feed reading to specific communities really well, while others are more about supporting Google Reader refugees.This arrived from Bloglovin' this morning...

There are dozens of Google Reader alternatives out there. Everyone is writing about them. So I set out to actually try out the top 5 and weigh in. Last week, Google nixed its well-known RSS feed reader, Google Reader. For those unfamiliar, Google Reader is a place to aggregate your favorite web content in one place, to read at your convenience. For most of us in the US, it allows us to keep tabs on our favorite blogs and news sources without having to remember to check 25 different websites, which, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, can be classified under first world problems. Google Reader is effectively the all-you-can-eat buffet of web consumption. (Chris Taylor from Mashable wrote an excellent piece recently on just how killing off Reader will affect people around the globe – definitely worth a read).

Perhaps the petition to keep Reader alive will work – and we know there will be people out there who are going to hold out – but in the case that it doesn’t, it’s time for the rest of us to find some alternatives to keep our web consumption easy and robust. Here are a few other RSS feed readers that may be viable options to replace your Google Reader habit...

I know, I should have seen this day coming a long time ago. Google Reader is closing on 1. July, and even though I heard the news several months ago, I haven’t done anything about it. And, now it’s only a few more days until I need a new way to read blogs....

When it comes to the RSS feed app wars, at this point if you are going to win people over, you have to be willing to do something different. Not radically different, but something that will make you stand out. Whenever I come across a new Google Reader app, I ask myself, “What does this app do that I cannot already do in Google Reader?”

In the case of Nextly, they definitely present you with a different experience all together. Unlike other RSS reader apps, they take a slightly different route that is somewhat interesting and could actually catch on. One feature that they do to stand out from the others is that they incorporate the use of the keyboard into the reading experience. Sound intriguing? Let’s explore more of this app and see what it has in store for us....