Without the social features it was great, because it aggregated your feeds without needing to run on your machine. (It also stored the entire history of the feed without taking up storage on your machine.)
I used to use Thunderbird for RSS feeds. That failed one day while I was on vacation -- the PC shut down for whatever reason -- losing track of what had happened while I was away. Not a huge deal, sure, but Reader was a huge improvement because it couldn't fail like that. It tracked everything and knew what was new and what was old with no chance of slipping.
(It also let you read blogs that were blocked by the Great Firewall, back before google itself was blocked.)
Lacking a free online RSS reader, I use Thunderbird again now, but Reader was better.
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Without the social features it was great, because it aggregated your feeds without needing to run on your machine. (It also stored the entire history of the feed without taking up storage on your machine.)
I used to use Thunderbird for RSS feeds. That failed one day while I was on vacation -- the PC shut down for whatever reason -- losing track of what had happened while I was away. Not a huge deal, sure, but Reader was a huge improvement because it couldn't fail like that. It tracked everything and knew what was new and what was old with no chance of slipping.
(It also let you read blogs that were blocked by the Great Firewall, back before google itself was blocked.)
Lacking a free online RSS reader, I use Thunderbird again now, but Reader was better.
Lacking a free online RSS reader, I use Thunderbird again now
Feedly's free tier works quite nicely if you miss Google Reader.
Glad to hear that :)