In a not-so-surprising yet disappointing announcement Google has revealed that it is going to turn off the popular and widely used RSS service Google Reader on July 1st. The service used by us at ETECHMAG and thousands of others if not million was launched back in 2005, when it instantly became a hit with news readers around the world.
The announcement has not come as a surprise because Google hasn’t updated the service significantly or in other words hasn’t improved it from a long time. Although it made the service integrated with Google+, that is the only update we can think of in recent history made to this product. Google is offering the users an option to export their Google Reader data so it can be used with other services. The exported data includes list of persons they are following as well as their starred and liked articles.
Citing the shutdown of this service Google says that the usage of the service had declined and it wants to pour its energy into fewer products.
While Google Reader wasn’t the only RSS aggregator available to user it’s demise could leave a big impact of the future of this technology. Many users including me relied on the service and will eventually have to find other ways of finding news on the internet. This would also affect many third party apps for both desktop and mobile devices such as Reeder and Press that were using Google Reader to sync articles as they will also have to look into other solutions.
The internet has not reacted to the news of the service’s closure positively and its users have been bashing Google for shutting down the service on social networking site. For many it is truly an end of an era and of a product they used for countless times in a day.
So what’s next?
Well there’s a saying that goes as if one door closes, another one opens. That’s what is going to happen to Google Reader users. Although there might not be an equally good solution to Google Reader other services will definitely pop up to take its place. One such service is Feedly. Feedly is a popular news aggregator service that hopes to attract the rejected Google Reader users. It says that it is currently working on a project that clones the Google Reader API and would offer a seamless transition to the users of Reader once it has closed on July 1st.
Not only to users but Feedly also says that it can be an alternative for app developers as it has created the API which is ‘identical’ to Google’s API and Google Reader clients could replace the old service with Feedly without much effort.
Have you been using Google Reader as your primary RSS aggregator? If yes what do you plan to do after July 1st? Let us know your opinion in the comments section below.