White smoke was seen rising from my browser today; Google announced the sunset of Google Reader. The official Google Reader blog says it’s retiring Reader due to declining use, but I’m not sure we can rule out Papal involvement…

I’ve been using Reader for a while now and I have over forty subscriptions. That may sound like a lot, but it’s very easy to navigate the categories and quickly scan the feeds. Also, Reader support Gmail-like shortcuts, which make it even easier.

I don’t want email based subscriptions filling up my inbox, so a cloud based alternative would be ideal. IMHO, they are better than desktop based clients since if I read a feed on my phone, or on another browser, that status is synced across all devices. This feature alone made me switch off of client based RSS readers.

What’s everybody favorite RSS reader, or if you don’t use one, what do you do instead?