Google has announced that the Google Reader service will not be available after July 1 of this year (2013). The service, which provided a “cloud” portal for aggregating News feeds from several RSS Feed sources, is the latest victim of Google’s spring-cleaning.
Since the spring-cleaning started in 2011. 70 services and applications have been eliminated or consolidated. Google Reader is on the list this time. Others that will be or have been eliminated in this round (of spring-cleaning) are: the Search API for Shopping, Snapseed Desktop for Macintosh and Windows computers, Google Voice App for Blackberry, Google Cloud Connect, Google Building Maker, CalDAV API, and the GUI Builder and five UiApp widgets of Apps Script.
The eliminated services have either outlived their usefulness, or to use Google’s terminology, are no longer “high impact” products. You can get a pretty good idea what services Google considers high or low impact by the amount of attention the service is receiving. I use just a few Google services, and one of them is FeedBurner.
It is used by Web content publishers to publish and manage RSS Feeds. Parts of the FeedBurner service have already been eliminated. For example, the FeedBurner API and AdSense for Feeds have been retired. If you use FeedBurner, you’ve probably noticed that the stats have not kept up with subscriptions.
Mine hasn’t. For more than a year now, my FeedBurner stats have been almost static, even though I’ve been getting about 25 subscriptions from emails alone (not counting subscriptions from other sources). So FeedBurner stats are not very reliable at this time.
That’s why I think the service is on Google’s low-impact list, and could be eliminated in the next round of “spring-cleaning.”
You are hitting a point that most people haven’t quite picked up on yet.
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You are hitting a point that most people haven’t quite picked up on yet. The problem isn’t just google reader (other sites will pick that up). It seems the whole RSS feed/blogging world is in danger of collapsing in favor of tweets, facebook posts, and other proprietary posting systems. I expect blogspot to go next.