A Czech RSS reader and aggregator of social networks in one will end in May

The Google Reader RSS reader ended in 2013, and users had no choice but to find a replacement for it. One of the possibilities was FlowReader, which is backed by Czech developer and entrepreneur Michal Illich. The ability to follow posts from the social networks Twitter and Facebook in one place, together with popular RSS feeds, attracted so much that a short article about the project was published on the Life Hacker server.

However, the originally promising startup will end on May 10 this year. This was announced by its founder himself in an e-mail sent to users. According to him, the decision to end the service was made after long deliberations and consideration of all possibilities.

FlowReader ends

FlowReader introduced a new direction, combining content from various websites with posts from social networks. It built on RSS technology, which made it possible to add to the reader virtually any website that supported it. The application environment was very similar to the discontinued Google Reader.

In addition to aggregating news from multiple sites in one place, Flow Reader offered fast publishing of links to Facebook and Twitter or saving articles for later reading. A specialty against similar applications was the ability to follow posts from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, or Pinterest in one place.

You could use Google, Facebook, or Twitter accounts to sign in. In terms of features, there was perhaps nothing significant that users watching the news from multiple sources might need - for example, organizing sources into categories, keyboard shortcuts, various sorting options, or several display methods.

Existing FlowReader users now face two important tasks. The first will be to download the data they can do in the Settings-GDPR section: Export data / Import data / Delete account via the Export OPML file button. The second task will be to find a replacement - from our own experience, we can recommend Feedly, where the downloaded file with monitored sources can be easily imported.