The old reader is back

In the fall of 2011, Google updated the Google Reader interface, but removed its social part. The user reaction was negative, more than 13,000 people signed a petition to return the old reader, and everyone who could, including ex-project manager Google Reader, spoke out in defense of the cozy sharebros community. Desperate to wait for the promised analogues to come out, the three of us accidentally joined together and made The Old Reader - in about six weeks, in our free time from the main work.

The current beta version of The Old Reader is an RSS reader with the ability to add friends, share posts with each other, and discuss this in the comments. You can log in and search for friends through Facebook and Google, and import subscriptions from Google Reader directly or from an OPML file. The Old Reader does not spam your contacts and does not litter on Facebook timeline with messages like “N read another article about ten new designer sneakers this week” (but you can enable this option separately if you wish).



In development: bookmarklet, simplified display mode of posts, even more hotkeys, improved work with folders and more. Ideally: an iOS application (I promised to write it hot when we have 5,000 users, and the rest of the team really wants to see and participate).

Despite the fact that the project was planned for fun and for friends, three days after the launch of the first beta, we gathered almost 500 users and a couple of dozens of thank you notes with feedback that motivated and helped us to decide on the priority tasks for our fake startup, which we want to share with everyone.

The technological stack is quite commonplace - Ruby on Rails as a backend, and a Knockout.js application on Coffeescript on the frontend. Resque is also used to import, update feeds, and some other pending tasks.

Meet - The Old Reader

We write about updates on Twitter and long blog posts .
We will be very glad to any letter from the reader.