I’m a bit disappointed with newsblur. I’ve paid today rather than wait for a free account to become available, but I don’t like the interface and most critically, google reader import doesn’t work.
Import from google reader is absolutely critical for me - I have dozens of sites in there. Without it, newsblur is useless to me.
When I attempt the import, an empty window pops up for a moment, and then a couple of blogs which I’ve never heard of are added to newsblur.
Sorry but I’m not really interested in debugging this, I want a refund.
One possible solution for the import would be to export your Google Reader data and import the OPML/XML file… this can be done via Google Takeout.
But this would not change the user interface, which you don’t like.
Real human being that’s totally unassociated with Newsblur here. Although it has its bugs, I’ve found the developer significantly responsive to user complaints about UI and existing bugs.
There’s also a lot of features here I find I really like. The intelligence trainer is pretty cool because it essentially introduces optional complicated filtering to the process. You can subscribe to a monolithic Gawker Media feed and end up seeing only the tags you like.
It’s definitely not Google Reader – but I think, in all honesty, it IS the best of the alternatives. I came to the decision – for myself, at least – that a Google Reader expatriate is going to have an adjustment curve with ANY service. I think that Newsblur offers the best tradeoff for the necessity involved in adjusting.