I think codingthebeach is right to call them a dark horse, but I'm also excited to see what they can deliver.
That said, one thing that disappoints me about the Digg statement quoted in TFA, is that there's no mention of open standards and/or the Open Web. I'd like to see these guys say "Yes, we will absolutely support the relevant standards you'd expect to find in a reader: RSS, Atom, OPML, etc." If they do support any "social" features they should consider exposing social graph info using FOAF, and using SIOC would be a nice thing as well.
2) The linked "Follow Our Progress" form is for email updates
3) Their tumblr blog has no rss link
That's not what I call serious. I use their site all the time, but it's no substitute for GR, and I don't want their curation to overpower my feeds. Reader was all about the RSS. At this rate they are sounding like a tardy Prismatic.
Additionally, Digg - the product, like HN, Reddit etc was never going to be a substitute for Reader. The product they are currently working on sounds like a direct replacement for Reader with a social slant. Seems like the most sensible move for them to become relevant again.
When Prismatic came out with an opportunistic spiel, even though they had nothing anything like Reader, it really rubbed me the wrong way. This hype piece feels the same, almost like a car commercial (bare bones! ultra fast!) or an Onion piece about how every co-founder in the Valley is starting a social news sharing service.
I think the key ingredients to a GR replacement are an open API so it is not beholden and can be on all your devices -- as mindcrime notes -- a focus on RSS, basic and friendly sharing, and then surely a little curation magic that Digg must know already. It's probably fine if Digg gets there in a few months. But for example theoldreader is there already.
http://www.codingthewheel.com/internet/could-digg-replace-go...
Digg is the dark horse in this race. It will be interesting to see how well they can execute.
RSS readers are a dime a dozen, and Google Reader is mediocre, at best. The interface isn't great, it's tied to a Google+/GMail account, and there's no way to subscribe to RSS feeds on an internal network.
I feel like I must be missing something.
I'm currently subscribed to NewsBlur and I have to wait for my feeds to load. It's not such a big deal as the UI is brilliant, but it's still annoying.
I'm trying out Feedly but I'm concerned about the behavior when Google Reader goes away since that's just a UI on top of what Google provides.
I'm still waiting in the import queue in The Old Reader.
It was less than half a second before a huge influx of users. Hopefully it will be down to what it was before when the scaling gets set up better.
They genuinely should have just let digg be and get costs way down. The ad income would have been substantial if they just left it alone. Digg stories ranked high in search and I imagine they would have continued to do so.
They gotta build the system as fast as possible, though. I get that they're building the system from scratch, but by the time Google Reader is actually shut down, most people will settle down with other products.
There's definitely space here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they will succeed at this, but I don't see the justification for calling the move "very stupid".
If they actually do a good job with it? This could be huge. Regardless, their product will do well.
For the record I haven't used Google Reader for years (and I have over 500 feeds in it as I used it a lot at some point). Why? Because I find my news elsewhere (on Hacker News, Twitter, Google Plus, /r/python, reddit/r/programming etc.) - - And not to say the awesome mobile services such as Flipboard or Prismatic. I guess RSS usage is even worse for the mainstream and non-technical users.
The Digg engineers have a lot more experience working at scale than the one person behind NewsBlur, and can probably whip out a suitable competitor and an API to boot faster than NewsBlur can.
That, and everybody loves competition.
"We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News."[1]
I've always had this "problem" of reconciling my consumption of RSS feeds (of items I will read every single one of, like an inbox, until the queue is empty) with that of massive streams of information like those mentioned above (where the best I can do is cull a little bit here and there from what's on the front page right now). The standard feeds from these sources don't really fit well within the normal RSS workflow since there's too much content to read exhaustively (and it's all sequential, removing the value of voting mechanisms). People sometimes use tools like Yahoo Pipes to make feeds that only allow content over a certain karma threshold, but these have their own set of problems (and you can't customize the results without spinning up your very own version).
Keep it simple, we don't need no stinking share buttons. Make it fast - my connection is badly lagging these days and I can't do anything about it short of relocating, so this is close to my heart. Synchronize across device - basically, make mobile apps so that it's fast on mobile too.
If they can execute well quickly enough, I can foresee Digg coming out one of the top 5 reader apps soon.
If you use the work social whilst creating a RSS reader you have already failed.
Sincerely, People who actually used Google Reader
P.S. A point-and-click html scraper to rss would be nice too.
Settings -> Export Feeds