As you probably know by now, Google announced last week that it is shutting down Google Reader. Meanwhile, a lot of users are experimenting with some of the alternatives, trying to find one that meets their news consumption needs. One of the more popular alternatives so far has been Feedly.
In fact, Feedly announced on Friday that over 500,000 Google Reader users had already joined Feedly over the previous 48 hours since Google’s announcements. Pretty impressive. In fact, it’s so impressive, it leads one to wonder why Google is turning its back on all of these people. But I won’t get into all of that again here.
I’ve been using Feedly a bit myself over the past few days. I don’t think it’s quite where it needs to be to replace Google Reader in my heart just yet, but it does seem to be a solid alternative. Unfortunately, that solidity appears to have crumbled a bit under the demand. The service is currently not running for at least some portion of its users (including myself).
I just returned from a brief break to find the service broken, and sure enough, a lot of people are mentioning this on Twitter as well.
On Friday, Feedly did note that keeping the site up is one of its priorities.
“Our main priorities over the next 30 days are 1) to keep the service up, 2) listen to new users for suggestions and 3) add features weekly,” Feedly said in a blog post. “To keep the service up, we 10x our bandwidth and added new servers”
So far, it likes there’s work to be done, but it’s not even been a week yet, so I think we can cut them some slack.
Update: It looks like it’s back up and running, at least for me. It will be interesting to see how Feedly continues to handle the demand. I’m sure a lot more will be checking the service out from now until July when Google Reader goes away.
Update 2: Some are still reporting that they’re having issues.