The advent of RSS feeds allowed publishers to create content feeds for particular authors, sections of a site, or even just stories tagged with a certain keyword.
To date, the strategy has claimed well known products like iGoogle and Google Labs.īut none of the products placed on the sunset list so far ever developed quite the ardent following that Google Reader did. In 2011, Google CEO Larry Page famously said the company would put " more wood behind fewer arrows," deploying its resources more judiciously and killing off products that failed to reach worldwide scale. And a whole ecosystem of apps that rely on Google Reader to power it will suffer the consequences. Still, an ardent group of fans - some of whom led a protest of changes to Reader in 2011, and even began building a Reader alternative - will no doubt be upset that a service that brought many of them together will be going away for good. As Google's social networking efforts turned to Google+, many predicted Google Reader's days were numbered. RSS became the infrastructure powering highly visual apps like Flipboard, Zite and Google's own Currents, leaving the bare-bones Reader looking outdated. Facebook, Twitter and other social sites proved more adept at luring mainstream users to share and read links.
Instead of continuously checking your favorite sites for updates, you can let Google Reader do it for you."īut tracking news through RSS never gained the scale of core Google products like search, maps, Android and YouTube. "Google Reader helps you keep up with it all by organizing and managing all the content you're interested in. "The amount of information on the Web is rapidly increasing," Google said the day of the site's launch.
Diehard fans of the service called themselves " sharebros," as was detailed last year in a lengthy, definitive feature on Buzzfeed. It was also an early experiment for Google in social networking, as the service's sharing features inspired friendships and even marriages. Loved by information junkies, the nearly eight-year-old service was once among the most popular ways of tracking large numbers of news sites, blogs and other publishers. Google Reader lets users subscribe to and read feeds from all manner of publishers, in a format that resembles an e-mail in-box. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months." So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. "While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. "We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites," the company said. The day long feared by fans of Google Reader has come: the service will shut down, the company said.