Goodbye Google Reader: Here are five RSS alternatives

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When Google introduced its Reader RSS aggregator back in October 2005 it was a little rough around the edges, but following a redesign around a year later, users began to flock to the cloud-based RSS service.

However, with the company announcing this week that it would be killing off Reader in a matter of months, we thought we'd put together five alternative RSS aggregators for you to try out.

Surpassed to some extent by the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other socially-oriented sites, RSS still has strong support from users, although many services are now cloud rather than desktop-based.

Feedly

Feedly has been in the RSS reader market since 2008, but with Reader now out of the way we'd expect to see an influx of new users. It's also one of the easiest to switch to if you're migrating across from Google Reader.

"We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a Feedly clone of the Google Reader API - running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, Feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using Feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless," the company said in an announcement on its site.

Like Reader, Feedly is cloud-based and freely available to use, but it looks less like Reader than some of the other alternatives on this list. Instead it has more of a blog or magazine layout look to it.

In order to use Feedly on the desktop, you'll need to install a Chrome, Firefox or Safari extension. It's also available for a number of other platforms including iOS, Android and on Kindles.