What the deprecation of Google Reader means

Google has angered lots of users today by announcing the deprecation of its Reader in the official Google blog. I'm one of the many users who are still using Google Reader on a daily basis. So, what does this mean in practice for me. The short answer is: very little. The Google Reader app is one of Google's worst mobile apps, so I have been using Feedly (for news) and BeyondPod (for podcasts) on my smartphone and on my tablet for a long time and the feeds are saved there anyway. I have practically no use of Reader on my PC or Chromebook apart from adding feeds. Furthermore Google, lets you download your data on Google Takeout (feed in an xml file, likes, connections, etc. in json files) until June 1, when the service will close for good.

Even though there are replacement services I, like many other people, have signed an online petition asking Google to keep Reader alive. The damage Google would cause it probably more psychological than real. So, what's the fuss on the web and social media all about?

Google Reader has always been a beacon of the web 2.0 era as one of the most important applications for RSS feeds (news and podcasts). An era in which companies like Yahoo! and Google fostered open standards and did great things with RSS feeds. Google, it's rather your support for open standards I will miss  than Google Reader on the web. So, please  keep the spirit of openness alive!

See also:
Why the classic Web 2.0 is going extinct in the Post-PC era

How to get Google Currents outside the US

Google Currents is a brand new magazine reading app similar to flipboard on the iPad. Unfortunately, in the android market it is restricted to download in the US.  It is still possible for people outside the US to get the install (.apk) file by downloading it from the xda-developers website:

http://goo.gl/pQuEG

Google Currents is optically much more attractive than the Google Reader app. It is possible to access the feeds from Reader in Currents. After install, the app takes quite some time to sync all sources, but after that the reading is very pleasant, both on a phone and on a tablet. 

  

Listening to podcasts on Android using Google Reader

Update: Google had decided not to support Google Listen anymore. You can still follow these instructions and use an alternative podcatcher (e.g. BeyondPod) instead.
Ingredients:

• Google Search
• Google Reader
• Google Listen

If you have an iOS device like an iPod you probably know where to go to when you want to listen to a podcast: iTunes. There is nothing like iTunes for Android and there are many ways to get podcasts on your device. The most confortable one is probably using Google Reader and Google Listen.  When you subscribe to a podcast on the internet Google Reader puts the feeds in a separate folder “Listen subscriptions”. It is possible to listen or download the podcasts via Google Reader as it has got an integrated audio player. Chances are, however, that you would like to listen to the podcast on your mobile device.

Using audio in Google applications

Google has great photo and video sharing services, however when it comes to audio there is a lot missing. A service like Audioboo or Soundcloud would be really great. Or simply the integration of audio in YouTube – in fact there are a lot of people who convert mp3 to video and upload it to YouTube. Actually, that would be one way of embedding audio into webpages that could be played by iOS devices as the YouTube player is HTML5 enabled.

Anyway, there is a flash-based Google audio player which interestingly is available at only some Google services. The Google audio player shows up in:

• Gmail – listen to audio files directly from your inbox
• Reader – enables reader to use podcasts RSS feeds in addition to text-based feeds.

Using Google Reader as feed aggregator and making your own upgrade for mobile devices

Ingredients:

• Google Reader
• Feedly app
• Instapaper app and browser plug-in

Newspaper apps have become very popular on tablet PCs and while they provide are really cool reading experience they are also a bit of a time waster, like going from website to website and browsing for relevant information in the days before RSS readers.

Google Reader is a great tool for online reading. You can bundle all your news sources in one place, keep track of your favourite articles (star them) and share them with other Reader users as well as on pretty much any social website. It has even got a notes feature where you can save webclips. If you want you can bundle several feeds into one feed and embed that feed e.g. in Moodle.

Syncing and storing (learning) content on your phone for offline use with Google apps

While google has no note-taking app that could compare with Evernote or Springpad google apps do have quite a lot to offer to sync your notes from the PC to your mobile phone or vice versa. So here are some apps that might come in quite handy for your studies:

1. Save feeds posts and webclips to Google reader

Read your news and blog sources on your mobile phone and mark them with a star for later reading on a PC (e.g. you might want to watch a flash movie which is not available on the phone or the article might be too long to read on the phone). Select a specific part of of an article on the web or on the phone and post it to reader as a note (webclipping).

2. Store links to websites on Google bookmarks

Have your bookmarks available anywhere. Similarly to delicious and diigo you can even create lists and share your bookmarks (social bookmarking)