I don’t need a link to source the news that Google Reader is going away. I logged in yesterday afternoon and was faced with the bad news that’s been expected for some time.

I’ve used Google’s reader tool for a long time to keep up on my favorite blogs and frankly even some of my ‘not-so-favorites’. I need to keep up on what folks are saying and finding in the world of miles and points so you don’t miss out on anything new by coming to View from the Wing. Google Reader has been an invaluable tool, I subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed and aggregate all of the posts so I never miss a thing.

Fortunately it looks like there’s a good, seamless replacement for Google Reader: Feedly.

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.

I like that word ‘seamless’ and they support Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Android, and iOS. That’s great because I use Google Reader now from my laptop’s web browser (Chrome) and from my phone (Android). I’ll be able to keep all of my feeds without doing a ton of work.

Google Reader will be around until July 1. I hope that my readers who follow this blog via RSS feed will consider making sure they don’t lose the content from this blog. One way is transitioning to a new reader that imports their subscriptions. Another is to manually remember to follow View from the Wing.

Or just subscribe to e-mail updates by entering your email address in the box on the left hand side of the page. And follow me on Twitter (this blog was named yesterday as a top tweeter for business travelers) and on Facebook.

The end of Google Reader is likely to do the most harm to blogs and bloggers who:

• Have a disproportionate share of their readers following them via feed rather than visiting their blogs directly (I have a boss whose blog has over 5x the feed subscribers as daily visitors)
  
• Don’t update very frequently. People don’t need to remember to visit a website with a feed, and don’t visit sites which do not offer new content each time visitors arrive.
  
• Have broad but not deep readership. Plenty of sites that people follow when it’s easy, they’re popular sites, but don’t have a passionate fan base — the passion being necessary to overcome inertia and get folks to expend the effort necessary to make the effort to ensure continued reading.

Some blogs may get more direct traffic, and thus some more ad views, and I suppose they’d think that a positive. But having fewer people reading a blogger’s ideas is never a good thing. So while some blogs will be harmed less by Google’s change, I don’t view it as actually good for any blogger — even if I do hope it is ‘good’ for Feedly.