The Old Reader

As the name implies, The Old Reader (free) was designed in to imitate Google Reader before one of its major redesigns?specifically, the one that nixed social sharing in 2011. If you have long missed those interactive sharing features of Google Reader, The Old Reader is hands-down the RSS reader for you.

While stable, reliable, and fairly well designed, The Old Reader doesn't have quite as many useful features as the adept G2Reader, a PCMag Editors' Choice, although it does offer support for more languages (G2Reader has seven, and The Older Reader has 17).

The Old Reader works well, and, if you're migrating to it from Google Reader, it doesn't ask you to rethink how you use your feeds or what kinds of feeds you might want to import. Some other alternatives, such as Pulse and Taptu, take a magazine-like approach and encourage you to read content from big-name media outlets. They also push a flashy interface that's rich with graphics, which may not appeal to dyed-in-the-wool RSS junkies. In other words, The Old Reader is totally non-disruptive.

You can import your Google Reader OPML file to The Old Reader and see your feeds in the new service pretty quickly. While it did import a listing for my Google Alerts, I'm not sure how the app processed them, and they don't seem to be updating any more (the came through just fine in G2Reader and continue to update). In The Old Reader, my Google Alerts now seem to be affiliated with a service called PubSubHubbub. I'm not clear what that service is or what it does, but while I work it out, I can continue to receive Google Alerts through Google by turning them on for email notification.

The name of the game in The Old Reader is "social." Like Google Reader in the days of yore, The Old Reader lets you follow other users of the site and see what they share with the community. Likewise, users can follow you. You can connect to Facebook to publish feed items you like there, or save them to Pocket to read later, as both services are integrated.

One minor feature that I quite like sits off to the right side of the page, a "dead" notice that lists feeds that haven't been updated in at least three months. It helps me keep my feed list clean and up-to-date, although I'd love the ability to customize how long a URL or feed must be inactive in order for it to be declared dead.

In testing, I hit one snag that I'd call an out-and-out bug. When looking at a list of unread feed entries, if I jump down and open one that I haven't read yet, all the others above it get marked as if I had read them. That needs to be fixed.

The Old Reader doesn't have any mobile apps, and the design, while simple overall, looks a little busy due to how it displays some text. For example, green bubbles with white text at first glance appear to be tags, but turn out to be non-interactive labels. It's a minor point, although I wouldn't think twice to suggest The Old Reader is due for a visual refresh.

I love The Old Reader, but I must admit that I love G2Reader a little more. It includes a tool that automatically highlights in your feeds any keywords that you save in your settings, and looks sharper to boot. I was also impressed that it handled the importing of my Google Alerts, while The Old Reader left me befuddled on that front.

The Old Reader is hands-down the RSS feed reader to use if you crave social interaction. If not, go to G2Reader, our Editors' Choice, and give it a whirl. If you're more of a DIY person, definitely try CommaFeed, a wonderful solution that helps you build an RSS feed reader that you can host yourself. We also looked at 312914">Tiny Tiny RSS, an open-source platform also for building your own RSS feed reader, but found it painfully slow.

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