Google pulling the plug on Reader is perhaps a blessing in disguise. It gets us to rethink news consumption in several ways.
It doesn’t feel bad to move away some of the online pie from Google the giant to something smaller. It was about time to re-evaluate RSS tools anyway. Feedly has come a long way. The user experience seems rather similar to Google Reader, so the transition is easy.
The visual presentation – of the Firefox plugin and Android app at least – is quite compelling. Feedly, Flipboard and Pulse are often mentioned together as being some of the most pleasing tools for consumption and sharing of aggregated news and other (social) media streams.
I think I’ll use all three for a while. Too early to tell which will prevail. Maybe all three, for slightly different use cases.
I like the fact that Feedly feels so similar to Google Reader. I like its “save for later” feature, which comes in handy when there’s a video, a podcast or long article I can’t immediately digest, or when my Buffer buffer is filled up to the (free) limit. Flipboard on the other hand seems to sport an even more appealing magazine-like browsing experience. Not sure yet how Pulse compares.
On the consumption side, I’d like to read my (grouped) RSS subscriptions, my Twitter lists and my Facebook home feed (if that’s what it’s called) from within the same application. Separately as well as combined, reverse chronologically.
As to processing, I’d like to be able to capture, annotate, share, save for later. I expect that the three apps will not differ much in this respect since these processing practices are mostly enabled by third-party apps.
This whole forced transition also compells me to have another look at my sources, the way I’ve grouped my RSS feeds and Twitter lists, and the purpose of sharing on Facebook vs. Twitter, (Google+?), my blog, etc.
In other words, this is a healthy exercise.
[UPDATE, April 15: Importing from Google Reader to Feedly went without a glitch. I believe I did it on the web with Firefox.
Importing from Google Reader to Pulse seems a bit more tricky. I did it on the web with Firefox. The resulting view seems more confusing. Will require some curation and getting used to.
Flipboard does not exist on the web. I mean, with a browser you don't get to you Flipboard account as far as I can tell. Not that there's anything wrong with that 
So I imported Google Reader from within the Flipboard app on Android.
For now, on a web browser Feedly has my clear preference. It's fast and flexible. Pulse is confusing and Flipboard doesn't exist.
On Android I'm comfortable with both Feedly and Flipboard. The latter is more beautiful, with its paper magazine metaphor.
If they all can save to Pocket. Once a day or so I can view the items in my Pocket account and favorite the ones I'd like to share. IFTTT picks up the favorited items, forwards them to Buffer, which dropfeeds them automagically, with two-hour intervals, onto Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
I just haven't yet figured out how to post onto Google+ as well, except via Google Voice, which I cannot activate on my domain. Or, alternatively, perhaps an IFTTT recipe featuring LinkedIn and Hootsuite might work... but I can't get Hootsuite activated on IFTTT at the moment.]
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