Google is retiring Google Reader as a part of the overall pruning of its services. The doors of one of the most sought after services by Google will be closing on 1st July 2013, eight years after its birth. A company official cites the declining usage of the service and increasing popularity of Twitter as the major reasons for its planned retirement.
For the uninitiated, Google Reader amasses feeds in RSS (or rich site summary) which is a format that creates stream from dynamic web content and provides people with the comfort and luxury of discovering the content and websites of interest and keep a tab over them. Many news aggregating services like Twitter are not as useful, as argued by many.
It’s evident that the “social” aspects like Google+, Facebook etc. are being pushed upon the online users more and more. That’s fine if I want to leisurely scroll through tons and tons of random posts by friends but I’d definitely turn to Reader when I want only the meat and potatoes. I believe that the reasons for Google Reader’s death in nutshell are Facebook & Twitter. They are getting bigger and in order, to compete with the blue mammoths, Google is pushing its Google+ very hard and on pretty much anyone & everyone who is using its other services like Youtube, Gmail and even Google Reader. Certainly, we can have the similar feeds in Google+ but I guess it won’t be going down well with all those geeks who need raw material, and not the fluff that comes with it. World’s techies have already made their outrage evident by trending #SaveReader since yesterday on Google+ and coming up with online petitions urging Google to reconsider the decision.
One of the most dreadful questions that pop up is what next? Consider using Flipboard, if you are one of those who have been using Google Reader quite on and off or not that often to be precise. Lean-back reading is what you can do best with this app and it does what it does exceptionally well. And for the ones who are passionate about Google Reader’s features, ‘Feedly’ has definite plans to launch a clone of Google Reader in near future.
I’d like to leave you with this hilarious video made by one of the loyal users of Google Reader who is visibly angry about the recent development. Don’t let the tongue-in-cheek tone distract you from how bang-on the video brings home the point that why Google Reader is irreplaceable when it comes to ease of use it brought into navigating content on the web.
