With Google On the Way Out, Consider Feedly Cloud Your Rebound Reader

With Google about to dump Reader in about 10 days, Feedly has really stepped up to replace the Mountain View giant's RSS service, most recently launching new apps and a cloud-based reader on Wednesday. All of the homeless Google Reader users have a fully functioning place to go now - Now please don't ever abandon us too Feedly!

Feedly announced Wednesday that they had finished working on their RSS infrastructure and had created a cloud-based version of their newsreader that can be accessed on any modern web browser. Before that, Feedly worked as a plugin for some popular browsers like Safari and as apps for mobile devices.

"Feedly cloud is now live, providing a fast and scalable infrastructure to seamlessly replace Google Reader. Feedly cloud also comes with a completely stand-alone Web version of feedly, that works with all major browsers," the company said on its blog. In addition, Feedly has unveiled nine applications - some for specific tasks and some powerful services that connect other news and social reading applications to the Feedly.

With this move, Feedly really does begin to resemble Google Reader, but more open, flexible and better (and hopefully around for a long, long time).

Feedly's replacement reader has been quietly preparing, and not so quietly gaining prominence over other reader alternatives like the not-yet-released Digg reader and the clunky old dinosaur NetNewsWire ever since Google announced it was closing its RSS reader. In fact, by March 15 of this year, two days after Google broke the bad news, Feedly had gained 500,000 new users, getting up to 3 million new users by April.

Ever since then, you could join Feedly for free and migrate your Google Reader subscriptions to their service quickly and easily. And for the last few weeks, Feedly has been migrating all of that data to its own servers, while building this new infrastructure and working with third parties to create apps and services for Feedly.

The new Feedly, as of now, offers a pure web interface with no plugins, web apps, or extensions required, which is great if you still use Internet Explorer, for example (by the way, why are you still using Internet Explorer?).

There are nine Feedly cloud applications that help expand the capabilities of the reader, including some that run feedly's architecture with their own user interface. For example, though Feedly has apps for Android and iOS, Feedly's cloud works for Newsify, the newspaper-like news app for iPhone and iPad. Feedly cloud can now also take the place of Google Reader powering gReader and gNewsReader, apps for Android and BlackBerry 10, respectively - so maybe the apps should change their names to fReader and fNewsReader now.

Other apps powerfully expand the capabilities of your Feedly account, like Sprout Social and IFTTT. Sprout Social is a social media management platform for businesses that offers engagement, publishing, and analytics tools. Now you can connect Feedly to that and post content to your networks through the app.

IFTTT is probably the biggest expansion so far of Feedly's capabilities, allowing you to connect your Feedly account to 63 other online messaging, social, note taking, and publishing services, like Evernote, Google Drive, Pocket, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, and Tumblr.

To activate the Feedly cloud and make sure you're migrated to it, go to https://cloud.feedly.com, login, and then restart fFeedly on your browser and devices.