Google Reader is dead, long live feedly

The problem with web based applications is that when the company kills the product it's gone. With traditional applications you can run it until your computer dies but with web applications you are dependent upon a slew of computers deep in the bowels of a data center usually in some deep rural location at somebody else owns.

Google has recently killed a bunch of applications a few of which I used regularly. They killed Google Reader, they may have felt that Flipboard was a doing a better job or so Google plus centered they decided to focus on it. I can't complain since its a free service and clearly they had a hard time monetizing it. Like delicious before it the internet is a very competitive and there are other services competing for that market. Fortunately Google is an open company so when I migrated to a new service it was not a problem.

Feedly is the one people seem to be recommending and its very nice. I prefer is interface, its more visual and less cluttered. The worry is that companies will start killing their RSS feeds since Google stopped using them. Google does not care since it scrapes the site so it does not need RSS. So a good company idea might be a psuedo RSS feed by a third party that scrapes sites and provides links to the original content.