Google Reader will be retired on July 1, 2013. This leaves a vacuum in the application landscape. Many of the best reader applications on various platforms have used Google Reader as a back end. There are several RSS readers that are not backed by Google, but these applications lack an important feature: the Continuous Client. When you use an RSS reader on one device, it doesn’t know about the posts you’ve already read on a different device. Google Reader solved that problem, because it was a common back end for multiple clients.

Correspondence

To fill this vacuum, I am starting an open source project to build an RSS reader back end on Correspondence. Correspondence is a client library and a cloud service for building occasionally-connected applications. Correspondence applications work off-line. They store data locally so that it is immediately accessible and updatable without a network. They also publish data to the cloud, so that it can be shared across devices and across individuals.

Correspondence is the perfect platform for a continuous RSS reader client. People want to be able to consume posts while off-line. They want the application to know which posts they have read. And they want the application to publish that to the cloud so that they get a continuous experience when they pick up another device.

Correspondence currently supports all Microsoft client stacks. For this project, we will begin by focusing on Windows Phone, Windows 8, and ASP.NET MVC. In the near future, Correspondence will be ported to Android and iOS via Xamarin, and will have JavaScript binding for rich web clients. Work has already begun on a native Android implementation of Correspondence. A native Objective-C implementation for iOS will begin in the future.

So eventually, we will be able to deploy the RSS reader application natively to any client, and provide a rich web-based experience as a fall-back.

Join me

Please watch the project on GitHub. Once there’s a basic project structure in place, you can fork it and help me out with pull requests. I’ve created an AgileZen board for keeping track of work items. If you want to participate in a more material manner, please send me an email (Michael at this domain) or tweet (Michael L Perry on Twitter) and I’ll add you to the board.

The clients will be launched in their respective stores as free apps. My intention is not to produce revenue on the reader apps themselves, but to promote Correspondence as a platform.

Please help me to support the folks that Google has left behind.