* Introduction

Google Reader is going? What?

I'm a heavy user. My pattern of use has evolved via clients and other solutions to Google Reader several years ago..

I've become reliant upon it - it's the first thing running on my computers and the last thing to close down.

My main focus is news but I also use it to keep up with  blogs, web pages, flickr group updates, standing twitter searches and lord knows what else. To lose it would change my way of working.

It has made paper newspapers an irrelevance - it's far, far more powerful as well as being 24hrs more up to date.

But it's far more, just as it's good at handling multiple streams of data that are changing minute by minute, it is also an excellent way to monitor some things that hardly ever change, You don't have to remember it, you don't have to check it but when it changes - there it is, immediately.

Easy enough, I thought - just get another RSS feed manager, pretty bog standard things.

Wrong! I quickly learned the importance of apparently trivial differences when you are doing something hundreds of times a day.

So I tried another - Lord no that doesn't work - and another. Now, having ditched a few. I have half a dozen continuously running.

The idea being that I would naturally gravitate towards my ideal. Unfortunately I keep gravitating to Google Reader.

I have some favourites, I have some which work well but frustrate the hell out of me and several discarded that probably work well, if only I had understood their facilities.

To add to the confusion the notification of the ending of Google Reader caused an influx and many failed under the load, so my comparisons are flawed until sufficient resources are in place.

In the confusion of multiple solutions I needed to draft some notes to help, what better than this deleted blog - part of the RSSSphere?

• So here are jottings to help me chose the solution. If it helps others that is good, but I'd rather you added comments to help me!