The old reader is back

In autumn 2011, Google updated the Google Reader interface, but removed its social part. The reaction of users was negative, more than 13,000 people signed the petition to return the old reader, and everyone who could, including the ex-project manager of Google Reader, publicly spoke out in defense of the cozy sharebros community. Desperate to wait for the promised counterparts to come out, the three of us casually united and made The Old Reader - in about six weeks, in our spare time.



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 it in the comments. You can log in and search for friends through Facebook and Google, and you can 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 new ten designer shoes of this week” (but this option can be turned on separately if desired).

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In development: a bookmarklet, a simplified mode of displaying posts, even more hotkeys, improved work with folders and not only. Ideally: an iOS application (I rashly promised to write it when we have 5,000 users, and the rest of the team really wants to see it 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 collected almost 500 users and a couple dozen thank-you letters with feedback, motivating and great help in determining priorities for our fake startup that we want to share with all.



The technology stack is rather trivial - Ruby on Rails as a backend, and a Knockout.js Coffeescript application 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.