It seems astonishing, but the tool that has come to dominate RSS reading will be gone on Monday. Google Reader is shutting down on July 1st, and for those of us who live our lives in RSS readers, the time has come to make a choice. I’ve already decided: Feedly is my chosen replacement.

However, if you subscribe to this blog via RSS, haven’t picked a replacement and want to keep reading via feeds, you have 48 hours or so to find yourself a solution.

If you want a quick guide to the replacements, TidBits has done an awesome roundup of possible Google Reader replacements. Lifehacker has a useful one, too.

There’s a few things to bear in mind: as long as you keep a back-up of your subscriptions you can experiment wit multiple services before settling for one. And – if you’re the sort of person who reads on multiple devices – then you might want to consider the more open services. Marco Arment nicely sums up why it’s probably a good idea to choose a service which allows multiple apps to sync with it:

A major strength of this multi-sync-service environment, as long as at least a couple of the services have widespread client support (which has already happened), is that users can pick and choose their favorite apps on different platforms. Google Reader gave us the same benefit: I was happily using NetNewsWire on Mac and Reeder on iOS for years, because I preferred NetNewsWire over Reeder on Mac and vice versa on iOS.

And, if you do nothing else, export your existing subscriptions using Google Takeout before it’s too late.

Google Reader is dead. Long live RSS.

Photo by Lars Ploughmann on Flickr, and used under a Creative Commons licence.