Google's reader was very popular, and when it was killed I think a lot of people didn't switch to an alternative.
I never really got into it properly (though I paid for and used feedbin for a while) not least because not everything supports it. Its main attraction to me is as being the one place I can go for everything, and if it isn't that, then.. meh, it's just another thing to check, and I gradually stopped.
Not that I don't intend to go back (as much as I intend to do a lot of things..) - it just needs more setup to be useful to me, email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around, have an email folder full of subs with rss forwarded there too.
Other things that annoyed me were latex not rendering, and the RSS article being just a tiny stub, or title only, linking to the real deal.
> email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around
There's actually quite a few powerful services to do this. I made a service called http://feedsub.com to do this a couple years ago. I'd also recommend http://mailbrew.com which has a nice digest format.
I think there's a lot of value in RSS as an underlying data layer for the web, and I think it's criminally underused on the consumption side nowadays.
For example, I'd very much like to see blogrings make a comeback, and there's probably room for a website community driven entirely by mailing lists and one of these RSS-to-email tools.
Feedbin does this, FWIW. You mentioned you had used Feedbin before, maybe they introduced the feature after you left? It's super useful, and justifies the cost of the subscription all by itself for me. All my newsletter subscriptions go into my Feedbin feed, and my email inbox stays nice and clean (and my real email address stays nice and private).
I never really got into it properly (though I paid for and used feedbin for a while) not least because not everything supports it. Its main attraction to me is as being the one place I can go for everything, and if it isn't that, then.. meh, it's just another thing to check, and I gradually stopped.
Not that I don't intend to go back (as much as I intend to do a lot of things..) - it just needs more setup to be useful to me, email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around, have an email folder full of subs with rss forwarded there too.
Other things that annoyed me were latex not rendering, and the RSS article being just a tiny stub, or title only, linking to the real deal.