Following the news of imminent shutdown of Google Reader, there started a flood of comments and discussions over web with aficionados lamenting over its scheduled shutdown on July 01, 2013. That was the bad part. So, the positive side of the news is that “feed” lovers will soon get an equally competent RSS reader.

After announcement of its plans of re-prioritizing its product roadmap for 2013, Digg announced that it will build an RSS reader as good as Google Reader. In fact, the replacement product hinted by Digg will pull news from a plethora of sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Hacker News. This would be just like topping on the ice-cream!

After announcing its plans last week, Digg received over 800 comments on the blogpost, with some really good ideas flowing in from the Google Reader lovers. From all the comments, Digg narrowed down incoming requests to four key points: keep it simple, make it fast, synchronize across devices, and, allow easy import from Google Reader accounts.

“Google did a lot of things right with its Reader, but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement. We want to build a product that’s clean and flexible, that bends easily and intuitively to the needs of different users. We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News. We likely won’t get everything we want into v1, but we believe it’s worth exploring.

We’re confident we can ship a product that meets the principles above, but if a feature is missing on Day 1 that you were really looking forward to, we ask that you 1) tell us and 2) be patient.”

Besides revealing their own thoughts, Digg also asked the interested ones to be a part of the development process and join their email list.

“We’re also eager to work with any developers that want to lend a hand, so get in touch if you’re interested in being a part of this (mildly insane) sprint.”

Google announced the shutdown of Reader mid of this month. After seven years of operation, the search giant is closing the service citing the decline of RSS in the face of Twitter and other sites delivering news bites. The shuttering comes along with a “spring cleaning” initiative that will see several other services also go away. While there is no official word on when this new RSS reader will become available, but it will be interesting to see how the company continues to leverage Reader’s closure.