What makes you think it was any different from the inside?
If Reader was in maintenance mode then that's even worse to have killed it. It didn't need new features or major work and had a devoted and loving following. It just needed someone to make sure the lights stayed on.
I use Digg Reader. Web is awesome, love the simplicity, the app need some love but is way more better than Feddly. The thing I don't like about Digg Reader is the Digg part, I only want my lovely curated RSS feeds.
Also try NewsBlur, Feedreader, The Old Reader and Newsvibe but Digg Reader was the best for my needs.
The default, so far as I can tell, is to dump every feed together to provide an "all-up" view. That could be okay, but then they layer a terrible card UI on top of it that's completely unintuitive. The top cards are big and generally pixelated (because it zooms in for some inexplicable reason), and it switches to a slightly different view after the first card, again, for no clear reason. I can swipe through the cards and reach the end, where it shows a giant checkmark and the words "Done" and "N reviewed". Reaching that page doesn't actually mean I'm done, though. Nothing is actually marked read until I go back to the top and tap on each them (or use the "mark all read" option). I'm either completely missing the interaction paradigm they intend or they haven't put much thought into what the interaction paradigm actually is. Maybe the devs all use iPhones and the Android client is an afterthought?
Meanwhile their website is generally okay, but I am completely at a loss for how to mark an item as unread once I've opened it. I should probably look for a different feed aggregator.
I am actualy working on a Feedly alternative. That's sorts articles by popularity. And can import Popularty counts from Sites that offer it. I hope the 70k Hacker News Readers on Feedly would like that. My Idea is to make search free and instead offer "Sort by Time" and "Compact View" as a Pro feature. Would anyone here be interested?
Of course, maybe everyone else loves the interaction model and I'm the oddball. That's entirely possible, but regardless I want to find something else at this point. (Trying Digg reader as of last night.)
I was very bitter about Google Reader ending at first, but honestly, Feedly is fantastic and I'm now glad it closed. That said, I don't use the search feature, so perhaps that's not as good as Google's was.
I know... I know. But it's served my basic needs for quite a while now.
That was my favorite part about it. It just worked.
(and in retrospect that comment was a lot more negative than I really feel about newsblur, I'm absolutely not looking to switch to something else)
Why do you say that?
In my experience every single teen I know is on Google+ and not facebook, while the older parents are on facebook.
Some of the teens also have facebook, but none don't have Google+.
This is because of two reasons: 1: Gmail means they all have Google+ accounts almost automatically, and 2: The privacy controls are much better in Google+, and they like that.
The only few people I know on Google+ are hardcore google fans who work in tech. Every teen (~15-18) I know is on facebook. And their younger siblings.
Plugin, Facebook Messenger seems to be quite dominant across those age groups too.
It is paid-for, although very cheap (and first month free). I ended up buying a life-subscription. I really miss Google Reader as well.
*I think they are going to change the name and redesign the product to push forward the adoption.