It is often asked of startup founders 'what if Google starts doing what you do?', a valid question. Perhaps it is worth contemplating products too small for Google to concern themselves with, ones they might abandon, that would still be an attractive opportunity for the rest of us.

I've been rooting for you and recall enjoying the blog posts about its making - I've always figured that "RSS is dead" and there is no longer money in clients (people used to pay for desktop readers!)..

Except that Google would kill Reader eventually and somebody will soak that userbase of nerds right up. And NewsBlur is clearly the top choice and will hopefully occupy similar mindshare as Reader did for us until now. Congrats, well played. :)

I wonder what the next one along these lines will be as now would be a great time to start building it.

Its not as lucrative as you would think. When Google Code Search shut down I launched code search http://searchco.de and while it got some attention it was nowhere near as much as you would expect.

That said I do think that going after markets abandoned by the big guys is an excellent way to go. Usually they abandon it because its not a billion dollar business and isn't worth their time.

I believe now that you need to start attacking their market-share before they close the product down and use the closure as a marketing opportunity.

Hmm. I personally have needed to use Google Code Search several times since it shut down, but have never found your site. When I've looked for alternatives by searching Google (say, for "code search"), I've found Koders (now Ohloh code search), but not yours. It seems like you might need to do a bit more SEO.

Yes I certainly do. I have been working on it, but Koders and Ohloh are pretty established so its a long climb. I think the .de domain might be hurting a little bit too. Happy to listen to any actionable items that can address this though.

Check out the periodic table of SEO: http://searchengineland.com/seotable

Kalzmeus on SEO (click around his blog for more, guy's a genius): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

Also some quick, simple advice:

1. Blog 2/3 times per week minimum. Target a single, relevant keyword per blog post (relevant to your domain). The post title, H1s, H2s etc, image tags should all contain your primary keyword. Blog posts don't have to be long, but they do have to be useful.

2. Build a G+, FB, Twitter account for your site if you haven't already. Blast out your new posts to these accounts using Hootsuite (free, but you can pay if you like).

3. Build an audience on the social networks - just search around, follow relevant people and share useful, educational material. Don't spam.

4. Personalised mass email from Google Docs and Gmail (kind of hesitant to recommend this in light of Google shuttering services!): http://www.labnol.org/internet/personalized-mail-merge-in-gm... you need to have "newsletter" signs ups (blast out a digest of your blog posts once per month), calls to actions etc on your site for this to work properly (i.e. optimise your site to capture names & emails). Great, low cost/free way to make sure your audience stays engaged and coming back to your site. You can pay for this kind of service too, e.g. Mailchimp (they've a free tier), Constant Contact, or the likes of Hubspot for full suite of marketing automation tools.

5. Best of Startup marketing/SEO here, that I've compiled over the years (absolute gold): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag_fyIIMSJ6DdGt...

6. Check out Sell More Software by patio11: http://www.hyperink.com/Sell-More-Software-Website-Conversio...

Many engineers don't fully appreciate marketing as patio11 would be quick to point out, but there's a start.

Being successful at SEO is almost the same as starting your own company. Any one of these is a full-time proposition.

I would seek out professional SEO company's and try to find the best deal. No way anybody could do all this stuff by themselves. In the end, it will be a worthwhile investment. From my own experience it's very time consuming to get it right.

Agreed. I do most of the above as an employee in a startup company, and we use Hubspot to have most of our marketing efforts "under one roof".

However if you're a bootstrapped company, you may not have a choice but to put the time in yourself rather than paying for professional SEO services.

If you have a technical and non-technical co-founders, this list is a large chunk of what the non-technical guy should/will be doing.

Building a great product that people want is pointless without letting people know about it.

@patrickk I've been looking for a basics post about SEo without tech speak for ahem years. That doc is brilliant. Thank you! I might be able to start implementing now instead of having SEO on my to-do list yet again.

Glad you found it helpful!

This is excellent, thanks so much!

Not a huge thing, but your HTML isn't valid - for example, there's Google analytics stuff after the closing </html> tag.

That kind of thing is never going to help

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchco.de%2...

I didn't know that had any bearing on it but thinking about it seems like it would be a ranking factor. I'll fix that up soon and see if anything changes. Cheers.

That doesn't make any difference at all to SEO (and in some cases can improve performance - or at least having it after the body tag does).

Grepcode also turns up frequently in results.

I think that the base of Google Code Search users that would be willing to pay for a replacement is probably dwarfed by the amount of users willing to pay for a Google Reader replacement.

I never found Google Code Search useful. What I wanted to be able to do was to search for code expressions with Google -- to be able, for instance, to search for the words "C++" or "call-next-method", exactly as I type them, punctuation and casing and all. No synonyms, no "corrections", no singular/plural conversions, no punctuation-stripping. Google never provided a way to search for exactly what I asked it to search for. Still the main thing missing from google search.

Google's Verbatim tool doesn't do the job?

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

I wrote up a quick reponse to that one (many googlers ask for data when confronted with how their main product is declining) and here it is: techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-search-results.html

Not pretty but have some real examples. Please post your own and paste a link here or in the comments.

Copied from comment on blog:

--------

Anonymous14 March, 2013 19:55

Obviously a comparison of search results is difficult due to the various signals used to alter search results, but as of 3/14/2013 I get what appear to be 'reasonable' results for both of your example searches:

"sublime text 2" "focus group" : http://i.imgur.com/4LpuUYq.png

cisco "anyclient" : http://i.imgur.com/kptK8HO.png

Again, doesn't necessarily detract from your issue, but just giving search terms isn't reproducible!

--------

I can now verify that Cisco "Anyclient" is not silently rewritten anymore. Will have to wait and see if they weeded out this particular snag, if they adjusted their fuzzing towards sane or if they just gave me a better bubble (I'd like that I think.).

Verbatim doesn't even fully disable word corrections. There is no way at all to search for punctuation characters. Try it yourself, type in ((((())))) or something and look at all zero results.

Their implementation was lacking, but the concept was sound. Someone could get this right, particularly if it was marketed as a learning tool.

Weird. I find they get literal code searches correct very very frequently.

Code search allowed regular expression searches.

I developed http://imnosy.com to notify you when bookmarks/pages you add are updated. Google Reader used to provide this kind of functionality, so I thought I would mention it here myself.

I use page2rss.com for this.

Good find patrikr: http://imnosy.com is a little different then that service. More of a bookmarking engine.

Code search never made sense I think. You could argue stackoverflow / github were the replacements.

I strongly disagree with this. Much of the world's code is not on GitHub or StackOverflow. This is a much underserved market in my opinion.

Well Nuuton will have that feature. Not at the alpha stage, but it will roll out.

" now would be a great time to start building it."

Now is too late. The right time to have started building it was 2-6 months ago. Now is the time to market an existing solution.

Citing the great gretzky quote, the "puck" is already here.

You missed the beginning of the sentence: "the next one" = "it", not Google reader

The way I see it you have until their next spring cleaning to figure out what they'll axe and make/market it. A couple of months is neither here nor there.

I mean-- err, yes, totally too late! Don't worry about it.

We've been working on something at Skim.Me (http://skim.me) for almost two years now as a replacement for Reader and/or iGoogle. We're still figuring it out but would love anyone looking for a replacement to signup for the next release.

Check out Frontpage, its an RSS reader that lets you browse all your feeds right from your lock screen. No inputting passwords or fumbling through multiple apps.

We've been working on it for the past few months.

http://www.frontpageapp.com

Damn it! I was working on a replacement which will concentrate on the "catching up" part. Guess I missed a golden opportunity for publicity. Ah well.

Definitely interesting the trend that Google is following, first with iGoogle and now Reader.

With backstitch (http://backstit.ch) we get questioned a lot why Google is no longer supporting these types of services (and if this means there is no opportunity there since they aren't worried about it anymore). We honestly feel like there is a lot of surface left uncovered when it comes to personalized/streamlined content and it just doesn't seem to be part of Google's refocusing (this has been seen with the shutting down of a lot of their lab projects as well).

Tried it out, not really feeling it. Not loading Instapaper and Google Reader articles. I can't find the option to delete my account, which is pretty annoying. How do I delete my account again? Thanks.

Sorry to hear about that. If you get a chance please shoot an email to [email protected] and we can take a look at fixing the issues you are experiencing or help you with your account further.

Similarly, who are customers that are neglected by the big players?

In my industry merchant accounts are very difficult to come by. We are considered high risk. Even with a year of processing records showing 1 chargeback out of >3k transactions I can't get access to a merchant with decent rates(currently paying 3.7%). All the big players turn us away. There's gold to be mined off the beaten path.

Which industry is this?

I've been trying to remember what NewsBlur was called for the past 25 minutes. Thanks for posting this!

That said, I lament the lack of a desktop app. I've been using Reeder for OS X, and I'd really like to have some sort of desktop app instead of relying on my iPhone or a website. Have you considered talking to existing app makers (e.g. Reeder) to see if they might want to switch over to using your service as their backend?

What conesus is doing is very cool. But I'm still using NetNewsWire on OS X because it's a desktop RSS reader and it's good enough.

Conesus: Have you considered running a Kickstarter for a desktop version of NewsBlur, in order to gauge interest? I'd definitely contribute.

NetNewsWire on OS X is nice, but I really need a) syncing between 3 different computers, and b) an iPhone client (and ideally an iPad client too, but not strictly required). Reeder + Google Reader has satisfied this until now.

I've been happy with FeedDemon Lite on the Windows desktop for ages. Sad to see I'm losing my sync with Google Reader, but at it'll still serve it's purpose.

Good news for you then!

I used to use GR every day, then on a whim I switched the free newsblur version. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't offer me a lot more than GR did, but after hitting the 60 feed limit a couple of times I've now gone paid and I'm happy to support a service that does exactly what I want it to do. It would have been nice if it imported by saved(or linked or started or whatever they were called in the end) stories from GR though.

One peeve though, I have no idea how to manage my feeds. Is there any easy way to move them round through drag-and-drop? It appears I have to move them manually one by one, but I have a lot of feeds and I'd rather not do that!

We've also been working on a Google Reader replacement for the last two years: http://intigi.com. With Intigi, you can import your RSS feeds from Reader (via OPML) and then filter the feeds by your preferred keywords and social signals (e.g., shares via Twitter).

Intigi is a paid service, primarily targeted at marketers, but we do have a number of startups and founders using the product for content discovery and sharing. You can quickly share content you find to social media, a WordPress site, or to an RSS feed (e.g., to connect with IFTTT).

I'm one of the cofounders and happy to answer any questions about the service and would love any feedback, if you decide to give it a test spin. Please email me at mjfern(at)intigi.com.

Hey - thought you might be interested in knowing there are lots of people at a total loss over on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1a8ygk/official_...

Might be worth a post or two

It's a great day to be NewsBlur -- good luck with converting the new traffic!

Their website is down now.

use http://dev.newsblur.com/

Saw it on their Twitter, didn't take long for it to die as well.

Until NewsBlur is back, check out niflet.com. It can handle 1 million visits hourly. It has 4000 feeds (so far) and adapts to your interests.

On the podcasting side, I began http://player.fm to manage podcasts in the cloud. Since then, Google has dropped support for its official Android app, Listen, and now Reader, which many people used for podcasts.

It works from the browser, including mobile browsers, and native apps are coming. There's also an OPML importer, though currently experimental, and subscriptions can be consumed as OPML, RSS, etc.

Wow, didn't consider this until your post. Losing Listen would be a big hit.

Can anyone confirm that the Android Listen app will cease to function (i.e. refresh your existing feeds) once Google Reader is shut down? Am pretty sure that it relies solely on Google Reader's "Listen Subscriptions" tag for refreshing your podcast feeds, so that's definitely another gap that needs filling.

I think it will. Google Reader was key to Listen. I've been using BeyondPod since Google stopped supporting Listen. It works with Google Reader just like Listen did. It's disappointing that such a key feature will be lost. Does anyone know any Podcast apps for Android that supporting syncing feeds like Listen/BeyondPod did with Google Reader?

I have been working on a river of news style RSS/ATOM/RiverJs client in the past few months (GPL3 license).

The project site is here http://rivers.silverkeytech.com and you get the app here http://goo.gl/kShgp.

The app is a bit young but it is maturing rapidly. I deploy a new version every two weeks or so. The next update is due in a few days.

Google Listen was killed off in August 2012:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/giving-you-better-goo...

It still continues to work and be used though, so GP's question is relevant. I think it can still work without it, but I'd be surprised if it's superior to all of the other free alternatives in the absence of Reader.

Is there a way to import your google reader list into it?

You bet! It's OAuth-based import, so when you create your account it's just a click away. Couldn't be easier.

EDIT: And OPML is the other option when you signup. It's an easy import process, since it's really quite important to get that part right.

Does that import everything or just the list? It would be nice to be able to import all the content as gotten from here:

http://www.dataliberation.org/google/reader

So I didn't import the first time I created the account - how do I re-import?! :)

Just click on the "+" button to add a new feed. In the dialog there is a button "Import from Google Reader or upload OPML".

A small warning: the OPML import will delete you current sites and replace them with the ones from OPML, they will not be merged with the current ones you have.

No OPML?

There is OPML import ability on the same modal that offers GR import.

It's taking like forever to import from reader.

Brilliant. I created an account. However, there are two very important features that Google reader has:

(1) It lets you add subscriptions to regular websites without an RSS feed.

(2) It lets you search for articles that were published before you subscribed to the feed.

I think you could add (2) simply by redirecting to Google search using the site:sitename.com argument.

(1) may not be that simple to add but it would be an incredibly important feature to have.

Google can do (1) because they crawl the entire web constantly. That's not going to be a trivial feature to add for anyone else. (2) is also probably a side effect of crawling pretty much everything before you ask for it.

I too am looking for a reader with rss search. This was the main reason I gave up whatever desktop app I was using at the time prior to Google Reader

Feedly does a decent job of picking up on which feed I mean when I put a site name in. I don't know how well that will work once they transition to their own API.

I started using NewsBlur about two months ago on a whim after using Google Reader for many years, and I really dig it.

It was super simple to import my feeds from Google and I find that the navigation in NewsBlur lets me read/scroll through items (and ignore articles that aren't interesting) much faster than Google Reader.

Anyone looking for a Google Reader substitute, definitely give NewsBlur a try!

NewsBlur is pretty good. I've used it for a while. I also write my own feed reader: Rssminer. It's not as full-fledged as NewsBlur, but is a much lighter alternative. It's support login with google and import google reader's subscription list.

http://rssminer.net/demo

I hope HN finds it useful too. It's also fully open-source too: https://github.com/shenfeng

It's fast and lightweight and uncluttered, which is great, but it lacks at least one bit of extremely critical functionality:

I need, 100%, to see my content in forward-chronological order (most-recent-last).

I've already given $24 for a year of NewsBlur, and I am super excited about being able to share and comment again. But, I know I'm not alone in wanting correct sorting.

Nice one.

Just 1-2 things I miss: - how can I mark an article read/unread? - could I delete an entire folder? - is there a limit on the number of feeds it can handle (I tried to import from reader, and I miss some feeds/folders)

I am trying to register to NewsBlur but I encounter an error every single time after submitting the registration form. You should have a look at it as this is the perfect time to grab new users.

Out of curiosity: have you also seen a decline in users? I'm interested to know whether Google has seen a decline due to a general loss of interest in feed readers, or whether they are losing users to competitors, such as yours.

Your website appears to be overloaded with traffic. You must be a happy man.

Does NewsBlur have something that resembles Reader's full-screen view? If not, is that anywhere on your roadmap?

Thank you. I've tried newsblur, but I just hadn't had the impetus to switch until now.

    <RSS>"Rumors of my death are much exaggerated"</RSS>

spin up more servers brother!

Does NewsBlur support authenticated ATOM feeds? Also, does it support 'deep' Craigslist queries?

I tried to add this feed, for example: http://denver.craigslist.org/search/cto?maxAsk=28000&min...

without success, but it could be your server getting hammered.

Thanks for your work. I signed up in December, thinking I'd check it out, and ended up liking it so much that I made the switch from Reader the same day (premium too).

I think that's a testament to how functional your app is. The iPhone app, while not up with Reeder (the iPhone app), is still very solid.

I look forward to the redesign too. The beta site looks great!

I have to say, an rss reader that depends on numpy and scipy is pretty intriguing.

I'm sure this has been reported already but, after creating an account I see:

"NewsBlur experienced an error

The error has been logged and will be fixed soon so you won't have to see this message again."

ditto

http://skimfeed.com - I don't like to share this out anymore because the server usually dies. But it's awesome.

If you like this layout you might also want to try out https://trackpanel.net

It lets you display RSS feeds (and bookmarks, tasks and notes) in a similar layout.

(Also plugging a side project of mine :-))

Usability tip: I would not have the Hi there box in the main panel. Maybe have it as a popup? Keep the main area clear.

Else, the first thing people try to do is find a way to close/remove/delete it so they can get started, which leads to the down arrow on it, which doesn't work to delete it. And now they're stuck wondering how to delete it...then they close the window without even tasting something they may have enjoyed.

The "Hi there ..." box is only displayed in the demo.

After you register you start with a completely empty panel which you can then fill with your own blocks.

Sorry for the confusion, I'll try to make it more clear :-)

I've been using NewsBlur for a few weeks now (I met Sam a couple weekends ago) and I think it's fantastic. Highly recommended.

How many sites can a free account follow? The front page copy says 64, but when I log in it says I can only turn on 12.

Found the commit, it was due to the load:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commit/f5ec4fa37d0a81...

Hopefully it will go back to 64 once things get under control.

It was 64 before this news. The site regained some functionality when it went down to 12. I chose to go to Feedly instead, which was prepared for this news and works perfectly.

I just tried it out, but so far the only thing I can say is that it is potentially good, but way, way too slow.

It's open source and you get paid anyway?

It's doubtful the average user wants to run their own server. I'm certainly capable of running my own, but it's more than worth the $24/yr not to.

Better get some more servers. newsblur.com and dev.newsblur.com are not responding. "502 · NewsBlur is down"

Well, I'm now a paid-up Newsblur subscriber ... couldn't find an easy way of giving feedback on the site so thought I'd use HN.

The layout feels visually ... cluttered? ... but the functionality is excellent so I'm happy. Also the Google Reader import failed the first time, but succeeded the second.

I don't use it every day, but I've paid for it since I first started using it a long time ago... Always want to support cool stuff when I can.

Make sure there is an export feature, for some reason, I can't find it, and I'll be a daily user.

Very cool, but where is the content in the demo coming from? The first thing I clicked on was some anti-Pope Francis screed. If it's a crowdsourced demo that's one thing, but probably not the friendliest thing to hand-pick.

What is your Android widget like? The large Android widget ( i think it's 3x3?) is the only way I use Google Reader now, and I use it a lot. I hate that this is happening. Does your widget look like Reader's?

Newsblur's Android app doesn't have a widget.

The 'Import from Google Reader' option, while a great idea, a) it needs to be advertised better, and b) it doesn't seem work for me.

Very cool. I'll definitely check NewsBlur out. Hopefully it rocks so much that it makes me forget about Reader altogether.

Happy NewsBlur customer here. I do recommend the service to anyone needing a Reader replacement.

I just tried signing up but I received an error message. Congrats on all the interest :)

when i read about greader shutting down I instantly thought "good day for Samuel"

Any (relatively easy) way to import all your feed from gReader?

Thanks for making this, it is way better than Google Reader!

When did you lower the number of enabled feeds to 12?

When he realized that the traffic would be too much, and money would probably pour: https://twitter.com/NewsBlur/status/312025565815255040

It's a move that makes sense sure.

But it irks me that a service I've been using for however long just one day decides to cut my quota by 80%.

It doesn't exactly spur me to start paying.

He could just kill the product, like Google did with reader. Would that spur you to start paying?

Maybe you should just realize that you should pay for the shit you use. Or if you don't value your own time, grab the source and run it yourself (and pay at least $1/month for hosting it, but probably really $10-$20/month for hosting it yourself).

newsblur sucks totally, its interface is overloaded, it is slow. it only allows you a few feeds (unless you pay)

In what way is it slow? I've been using it for almost 2 years now, and have only seen slowness with particular feeds.

Thank you for supporting Meego!

And that site is down......

i don't see windows phone listed on the web site.

Is there a win8 version (win store, not desktop).

tks

newsblur cannot access now

Looks like it's not able to handle the load. Will check in some time.

Nice app btw. The only good thing from GR closure might be that the dev community comes up with some real great alternatives. And yes, I hope paid ones.

For an alternative check out niflet.com. It adapts to your interests. It's written in Go, such that it can handle a ton of traffic on a cheap box.

Where shall I keep my feeds there? I mean my list of blogs that I want to follow. Their feed I mean. There is thousands of sources where I can explore, be social(though I hate the term) and read stories which learns from my choices (like Prismatic which certainly doesn't learn - just shows stories filtered using keywords).

So, no dear this doesn't cut it.

Yes, it won't cut it for those who want control over the feeds.

Get it...

http://www.cloudflare.com/plans

I highly doubt that the performance bottleneck has anything to do with serving cacheable static files. When a user asks you which of their feeds have been updated in the last 60 seconds, that's not the kind of request you can just offload to a CDN.

Even their landing page is down right now. Would help with that!

AFAIK, Cloudflare does not cache HTML files, full stop.

I believe it does - I use Cloudflare with my blog and every file, including *.html files, appears to be served by them.

The documentation and marketing on cloudflare.com is a bit misleading on this. Unless you do something unusual and potentially fragile with their page rules, it does not cache HTML: https://support.cloudflare.com/entries/22094188--Does-CloudF... It will hit your server for every page request.

(In fact it only caches certain static files as determined by their file extension. It does not seem to pay much attention to Content-Type of Cache headers. Ugh.)