Google have announced that they are retiring Google Reader in July.
We're retiring Reader on July 1. We know many of you will be sad to see it go. Thanks for 8 great years! http://t.co/0jtSqBnORp
— Google Reader (@googlereader) March 13, 2013
Retiring implies that Google Reader will be taking life a little easier, spend a little more time in the garden, visit National Trust sites, watch Countdown. Retiring implies that we might actually see more of Google Reader as they will be less busy than they were before.
No Google is trying to tone down the reality, the reality of course is that Google are going to kill Google Reader dead!
I’ve used Google Reader for many years, but probably like most people in recent years I’ve not used Google Reader natively, I have used it to deliver RSS feeds into services such as FlipBoard. This has to be one of the reasons why Google are probably retiring the service, the main reason of course is Google+, however another reason must be that we used the Google Reader service (and API) but we rarely visited the actual Google Reader service on the web. This gave Google very opportunities for monetisation compared to other things they do such as Gmail.
There is some concern that the death of Google Reader will actually result in the death of RSS. The reason for this thinking is that curation and sharing of news has moved from RSS onto social networking sites such as Facebook and the Twitter.
Interestingly ask yourself where did you hear about the death of Google Reader first? Was it in Google Reader, or was it on the Twitter? For me it was on the Twitter, and this says a lot about why we are now using social networking sites for sharing news and moving away from RSS.
I do like RSS, it makes sense to me, an easy way to push content to people. However it never really made the mainstream, as a background tool it was perfect, but is (I nearly wrote was) reliant on good tools for making RSS user friendly.
I still want to curate and collate RSS feeds from various sources so I am now looking for a similar alternative, what are you going to do?
I’ve used Netvibes for a few years, as a set of home pages with feeds in widgets. Netvibes say they have been getting very busy recently with migration from Google Reader
Feedly is looking good for me 🙂 And they will provide a way to seamlessly migrate from Google Reader.