After the gnashing of teeth that greeted the news of Google's decision to close down Google Reader (effective in a few days), over the past few months I have tried out more than a few possible replacements.

I have been surprised by how many 'Reader replacements' have popped up or gained attention since the announcement. It definitely seems like Google had largely killed-off a market when they developed Reader, and now have almost single-handedly recreated it by shutting down their service.

A lot are aiming to just re-create Google Reader and it's features (or previous features); The Old Reader, and Digg's Reader come to mind. There are others who have been around for a while that are gaining new-found attention too; Feedly, and NewsBlur are prominent amongst many others.

I eventually settled on Feedly. Now that their desktop version is liberated from being a browser plugin, it's a fantastically complete replacement. I like their interface, and their Android app is very decent too. The migration from Google Reader was a single-click breeze, and their newly developed back-end now serves as a data source for a lot of other readers.

Overall it's been a pretty impressive effort from Feedly in a relatively short amount of time. A recent survey has hinted that they are thinking of monetising the service somehow, and I'm not totally against that. I'd gladly pay a couple of dollars a month for a very decent service such as theirs.

The demise of Google Reader might actually be a good thing. In hindsight, they really allowed Google Reader to stagnate after they stripped out useful features and replaced them with Google+ integration. More competition and innovation is never a bad thing, and I think we are beginning to see it again in the RSS reader department.