[wpietri]

Paradoxically, the fact that this is a do-everything app makes me much less likely to try it out. If it were just, say, an RSS reader, then I might try exporting OPML from my current feed reader and seeing what happens. But reading is important enough to me that I would be very reluctant to put all my eggs in one basket. Especially a startup, where the best case is that a lot of my most important stuff requires me to pay $100/year forever.

[karlb]

I migrated to Reader from Instapaper, which was crashing all the time, so I had little to lose. Before that, my company used Diigo, which felt clunky and unloved. Reader is incredibly polished. I absolutely love it, and I’m delighted when they add new features. I’ve been on the beta for 11 months, and am genuinely excited to read the updates. They launched YouTube support a few days ago, and already it’s great (on desktop). I also love being able to add tweet threads (effectively turning them into articles I can highlight). Reader has a feature that automatically subscribes to RSS feeds you like (based on your reading and highlighting history) and, for me, it was at least as surprisingly effective as the recommendation engines in Spotify and Amazon.

Even though I imagine it’s hard to create software like this, I don’t believe it’s beyond one company to make a do-everything app. Already, it’s do-enough-for-my-needs, and their velocity is impressive. (I want them to add podcasts next, with highlightable transcripts. That sounds easy to me, but every podcast-workflow app I’ve tried has been buggy/crashy/awful.)

[masklinn]

Since you apparently use the RSS feature could you explain how it works / what it does?

My primary use case is tracking serials update and shoving the rss target (not the feed itself as that’s rarely complete) into an offline reader. Is this able to load tte feed into its own timeline on its own without user intervention?

[alwayslikethis]

I agree. Subscription-based proprietary software is the worst kind out there in terms of user autonomy, because there exists a strong incentive against your ability to leave the service in order to keep you paying. The larger the scope, the greater my potential loss I face.