It is often asked of startup founders 'what if Google starts doing what you do?', a valid question. Perhaps it is worth contemplating products too small for Google to concern themselves with, ones they might abandon, that would still be an attractive opportunity for the rest of us.

I've been rooting for you and recall enjoying the blog posts about its making - I've always figured that "RSS is dead" and there is no longer money in clients (people used to pay for desktop readers!)..

Except that Google would kill Reader eventually and somebody will soak that userbase of nerds right up. And NewsBlur is clearly the top choice and will hopefully occupy similar mindshare as Reader did for us until now. Congrats, well played. :)

I wonder what the next one along these lines will be as now would be a great time to start building it.

I've been trying to remember what NewsBlur was called for the past 25 minutes. Thanks for posting this!

That said, I lament the lack of a desktop app. I've been using Reeder for OS X, and I'd really like to have some sort of desktop app instead of relying on my iPhone or a website. Have you considered talking to existing app makers (e.g. Reeder) to see if they might want to switch over to using your service as their backend?

Is there a way to import your google reader list into it?

Brilliant. I created an account. However, there are two very important features that Google reader has:

(1) It lets you add subscriptions to regular websites without an RSS feed.

(2) It lets you search for articles that were published before you subscribed to the feed.

I think you could add (2) simply by redirecting to Google search using the site:sitename.com argument.

(1) may not be that simple to add but it would be an incredibly important feature to have.

NewsBlur is pretty good. I've used it for a while. I also write my own feed reader: Rssminer. It's not as full-fledged as NewsBlur, but is a much lighter alternative. It's support login with google and import google reader's subscription list.

http://rssminer.net/demo

I hope HN finds it useful too. It's also fully open-source too: https://github.com/shenfeng

How many sites can a free account follow? The front page copy says 64, but when I log in it says I can only turn on 12.

It's a great day to be NewsBlur -- good luck with converting the new traffic!

On the podcasting side, I began http://player.fm to manage podcasts in the cloud. Since then, Google has dropped support for its official Android app, Listen, and now Reader, which many people used for podcasts.

It works from the browser, including mobile browsers, and native apps are coming. There's also an OPML importer, though currently experimental, and subscriptions can be consumed as OPML, RSS, etc.

I'm sure this has been reported already but, after creating an account I see:

"NewsBlur experienced an error

The error has been logged and will be fixed soon so you won't have to see this message again."

http://skimfeed.com - I don't like to share this out anymore because the server usually dies. But it's awesome.

It's open source and you get paid anyway?

What is your Android widget like? The large Android widget ( i think it's 3x3?) is the only way I use Google Reader now, and I use it a lot. I hate that this is happening. Does your widget look like Reader's?

When did you lower the number of enabled feeds to 12?

newsblur sucks totally, its interface is overloaded, it is slow. it only allows you a few feeds (unless you pay)

Looks like it's not able to handle the load. Will check in some time.

Nice app btw. The only good thing from GR closure might be that the dev community comes up with some real great alternatives. And yes, I hope paid ones.

Get it...

http://www.cloudflare.com/plans

Good news for you then!

I used to use GR every day, then on a whim I switched the free newsblur version. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't offer me a lot more than GR did, but after hitting the 60 feed limit a couple of times I've now gone paid and I'm happy to support a service that does exactly what I want it to do. It would have been nice if it imported by saved(or linked or started or whatever they were called in the end) stories from GR though.

One peeve though, I have no idea how to manage my feeds. Is there any easy way to move them round through drag-and-drop? It appears I have to move them manually one by one, but I have a lot of feeds and I'd rather not do that!

We've also been working on a Google Reader replacement for the last two years: http://intigi.com. With Intigi, you can import your RSS feeds from Reader (via OPML) and then filter the feeds by your preferred keywords and social signals (e.g., shares via Twitter).

Intigi is a paid service, primarily targeted at marketers, but we do have a number of startups and founders using the product for content discovery and sharing. You can quickly share content you find to social media, a WordPress site, or to an RSS feed (e.g., to connect with IFTTT).

I'm one of the cofounders and happy to answer any questions about the service and would love any feedback, if you decide to give it a test spin. Please email me at mjfern(at)intigi.com.

Hey - thought you might be interested in knowing there are lots of people at a total loss over on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1a8ygk/official_...

Might be worth a post or two

I started using NewsBlur about two months ago on a whim after using Google Reader for many years, and I really dig it.

It was super simple to import my feeds from Google and I find that the navigation in NewsBlur lets me read/scroll through items (and ignore articles that aren't interesting) much faster than Google Reader.

Anyone looking for a Google Reader substitute, definitely give NewsBlur a try!

I am trying to register to NewsBlur but I encounter an error every single time after submitting the registration form. You should have a look at it as this is the perfect time to grab new users.

Out of curiosity: have you also seen a decline in users? I'm interested to know whether Google has seen a decline due to a general loss of interest in feed readers, or whether they are losing users to competitors, such as yours.

Your website appears to be overloaded with traffic. You must be a happy man.

Does NewsBlur have something that resembles Reader's full-screen view? If not, is that anywhere on your roadmap?

Thank you. I've tried newsblur, but I just hadn't had the impetus to switch until now.

    <RSS>"Rumors of my death are much exaggerated"</RSS>

spin up more servers brother!

Does NewsBlur support authenticated ATOM feeds? Also, does it support 'deep' Craigslist queries?

I tried to add this feed, for example: http://denver.craigslist.org/search/cto?maxAsk=28000&min...

without success, but it could be your server getting hammered.

Thanks for your work. I signed up in December, thinking I'd check it out, and ended up liking it so much that I made the switch from Reader the same day (premium too).

I think that's a testament to how functional your app is. The iPhone app, while not up with Reeder (the iPhone app), is still very solid.

I look forward to the redesign too. The beta site looks great!

I have to say, an rss reader that depends on numpy and scipy is pretty intriguing.

I've been using NewsBlur for a few weeks now (I met Sam a couple weekends ago) and I think it's fantastic. Highly recommended.

I just tried it out, but so far the only thing I can say is that it is potentially good, but way, way too slow.

Better get some more servers. newsblur.com and dev.newsblur.com are not responding. "502 · NewsBlur is down"

Well, I'm now a paid-up Newsblur subscriber ... couldn't find an easy way of giving feedback on the site so thought I'd use HN.

The layout feels visually ... cluttered? ... but the functionality is excellent so I'm happy. Also the Google Reader import failed the first time, but succeeded the second.

I don't use it every day, but I've paid for it since I first started using it a long time ago... Always want to support cool stuff when I can.

Make sure there is an export feature, for some reason, I can't find it, and I'll be a daily user.

Very cool, but where is the content in the demo coming from? The first thing I clicked on was some anti-Pope Francis screed. If it's a crowdsourced demo that's one thing, but probably not the friendliest thing to hand-pick.

The 'Import from Google Reader' option, while a great idea, a) it needs to be advertised better, and b) it doesn't seem work for me.

Very cool. I'll definitely check NewsBlur out. Hopefully it rocks so much that it makes me forget about Reader altogether.

Happy NewsBlur customer here. I do recommend the service to anyone needing a Reader replacement.

I just tried signing up but I received an error message. Congrats on all the interest :)

when i read about greader shutting down I instantly thought "good day for Samuel"

Any (relatively easy) way to import all your feed from gReader?

Thanks for making this, it is way better than Google Reader!

Thank you for supporting Meego!

And that site is down......

i don't see windows phone listed on the web site.

Is there a win8 version (win store, not desktop).

tks

newsblur cannot access now