Google Reader's Going Bye bye

So for those of you who are out there using Google Reader you probably got a little pop-up when you logged in a few weeks ago saying Google Reader will be shut down July 1, 2013. Whuttttt! If you aren't familiar with Google Reader it is a free Google product where you can subscribe to all your favorite blogs and read them in one location. With the disappearance of Google's product many of us are left looking for a replacement. Some of the products out there are free and some charge. I haven't tried all of the products out there but after reading a few blog posts about the topic I decided to try Feedly, a free reader. Its not as easy as Google Reader but once I figured out the best way to organize it, it got a little easier. Here are some of the features and benefits.

Feedly has apps for iOS, Android and Kindle. As well as, add-ons/apps for Firefox and Google Chrome.

The biggest benefit was the fact that Google Reader already integrates with Feedly and therefore I didn't have to download my subscription list and load it into Feedly, they were already there.

You have the option of logging into your Facebook profile and having the new feed display to the right of all the blog posts. It isn't the most advanced plug-in though it only updates when you refresh the page. And it only displays a few items from your Facebook news feed at a time and you can't scroll down to view more. So this isn't a replacement for logging into Facebook.

You can organize your blogs into categories of your choosing. So when I want to look at only my Home Blogs or Food Blogs I can just open that folder. You can tag posts for future reference. Like I've created a Recipe tag for when I find a recipe that I want to be able to find later so I can make it. Then I don't have to try and remember which blog it was on and how long ago it was posted.

You can click on a post to read the full article in Feedly (unless the blogger truncates their posts) or you can use preview. Preview Mode has to be one of my favorite features.

Hi, Gemma, hope you don't mind that I used your blog for my screen shot of the Preview Mode. I love The Sweetes Digs.

When you are using Google Reader you aren't able to navigate a blogs website without clicking over to the site. If you click on the preview button at the top of an article it actually will open the website in the Feedly window but you can still see Feedly behind it. But it isn't just a preview of that one article you can actual move around the site without leaving Feedly.

So there might be more features that I haven't discovered yet but for now that is what I've figured out.

For those of you who use a reader, what are you using?