I realize that everyone reading this has already either made a decision on a Google Reader replacement, or just had their eyes glaze over when I said “Google Reader replacement”, which means this post is probably unnecessary. But still, I want to take a second to sing the praises of NewsBlur.

NewsBlur is an RSS reader developed and maintained by one guy, Samuel Clay. He was working on it long before Google announced that they were killing Reader, and when that announcement came out he managed to scale up his reader from supporting a couple thousand users to, at current count, over 20,000.

Not only is the tool nice to look at and snappy, but Samuel’s support is fantastic. I filed a help ticket yesterday morning complaining about a reload that wasn’t working, and by last night he had it fixed. It seems even snappier today, which is awesome.

I’m not opposed to paying for services I find useful, and I’m quite happy to be a premium user of NewsBlur and throw a few bucks Samuel’s way on a regular basis. Here’s hoping that NewsBlur continues to succeed long-term, and that other developers follow Samuel’s lead in creating great services.