These apps will have to find another method of importing articles from the web or just fade off into the sunset when Reader meets its ultimate demise. Akregator is KDEs feed reader which is easy to use and powerful enough to provide the latest updates from news sites, blogs and RSS/Atom enabled websites. Additionally, there is a rather healthy ecosystem of third party apps for mobile devices that use Google Reader to synchronize news articles. Google says it is killing it off because "usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products." As one of the most popular RSS aggregators around, the death of Google Reader could spell doom for the RSS protocol itself, which has seen waning popularity since the rise of social sharing services. While a number of users will be affected by the end of Google Voice for BlackBerry and the various API services, the biggest blow for many will be the disappearance of Google Reader. Lack of usage and a 'focus on fewer products' are to blame
BEST RSS READER 2017 UPDATE
The company will no longer sell or update the desktop versions of its Snapseed photo editing app, and a number of other developer APIs are also being killed off. Once youve done it, then you can paste the URL in the specific field shown by the RSS Reader aggregator in use. In addition to killing off Reader, beginning next week Google is ending support for the Google Voice app for BlackBerry smartphones, instead pointing users toward the HTML5 webapp. Google is offering users a way to export their Reader content, including lists of users that they follow and starred and liked articles. The last time that Google updated the product, it built in integration for the Google+ social network and removed Reader's own native sharing service, causing a bit of a backlash with die hard users. Reader has gone through a number of iterations, but it had not been significantly updated in a long time. The service, which originally launched back in 2005, will be officially put out to pasture on July 1st, 2013. Also, we use the exact same PubSubHubbub protocol to push content from any feed, which makes it very simple for our users to use our service in addition to subscribing to available hubs.Google has announced yet another spring cleaning of its various services, and this time around, the company is giving the axe to its Google Reader RSS aggregator. We also normalize the content and do a few other things to help you consume feed data in the simplest and cheap way (polling can be crazy expensive). I created one : Superfeedr and I believe we do a good job with this. The last solution is to use a 3rd party application do this data gathering (using all the techniques above) and ping you when these feeds actually have new content. If you do publish feeds, I would encourage joining this crowd, and if you plan on consuming some, please, implement the susbcriber side as well. Good news readers will allow grouping and organizing sources and offer a choice of how information is presented. A modern news reader will allow pulling information from RSS feeds, social networks, and even news sites and blogs that lack RSS functionality. Other feed publishing apps (like feedburner, Gowalla. News readers aggregate information from various sources. By chance, all the big blogging platforms (Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress, Blogger, SixApart. It's very efficient, but requires the publisher to implement it. It's an open protocol that allows the feed publisher to directly push the content of the feed to subscribing applications. The most efficient technique is to use PubSubHubbub, which is a open protocol used by Google Reader, Netvibes and a few thousand other apps (like, Twitterfeed, Friendfeed.). The old XML-RPC ping servers can also be used by these guys.
Based on the frequency of past updates, based on the number of users who susbcribed. There are a lot of techniques to determine when is the best time to do a poll. Time based polling is still, unfortunately the most frequent solution. This way they would poll feeds only when users asked from them, so there is no need for them to run some kind of time loop.
For example, I know that Netvibes was doing the parsing on the client side (but cached the content on the server), so it saved them a lot of resources. The first thing you need to consider is that they may not all do the parsing on the server side.
the "worst" one being the one that you describe.