The imminent close of Google Reader is upon us, the “sunset,” the “shuttering of doors,” if you will. I’ve been playing ostrich and putting my head in the sand for a while. That’s not to say that I didn’t try some reader alternatives. I’m just a curmudgeon and think they all suck. I brought up instances of Tiny-Tiny-RSS, Selfoss, tried feedly, flipboard, old reader, and a multitude of others. They all sucked.

Feedly had a good thing going, honestly. I started to dig the card format, begrudgingly, and was resigned that Feedly was likely my fate. But then, the “mark as read automatically” didn’t work for me… And then, the “mark as read” button didn’t work… Its very frustrating to see the same articles pop up over and over when you’re trying to make yourself like an RSS reader. Nope.

Digg and AOL (did I just link to AOL on my website?) are allegedly coming out with news readers as well. For some reason, I got ultra hyped about AOL’s reader. I figured “No one will want to use this, so I can waltz into the beta!” Well, not so.

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Overwhelming interest? Well, that’s odd… I guess everyone else got ultra hyped about the prospect of AOL dumping so much energy and so many resources into a product that it HAS to be good, as well. After 2 long days (because the internet makes people impatient), I got this:

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Well I guess demand wasn’t THAT overwhelming. Its pretty nice, so far. I’m having an issue with automatically-marking-things-as-read-when-I-scroll, but it does work in “Full” view, which most closely resembles Google Reader anyhow.

So far its been pretty nice. I’ll wait for more features and more enhancement. I hope this is indicative of “AOL of the future.” Could be really exciting.