But they never caught on among more casual users content to visit their favorite sites or rely on friends on social media to share interesting posts. Reader, and RSS feeds in general, remain popular with active, Web-savvy users who rely upon them to pull together the best of the Internet in one easy-to-read stream. “We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go,” said software engineer Alan Green on the Google Reader blog.

After joining Google, he worked with a team to perfect and enhance it. Released in 2005, Google Reader was begun four years earlier as a project called JavaCollect by independent software engineer Chris Wetherell. “To make the most of these opportunities, we need to focus – otherwise we spread ourselves too thin and lack impact.Īmong the 40 shutdowns announced Wednesday also were the Google Voice app for BlackBerry, the desktop version of photo app Snapseed, Google Cloud Connect and Google Building Maker, which lets users create models of buildings on Google Earth and Google Maps.

“It’s been a long time since we have had this rate of change – it probably hasn’t happened since the birth of personal computing 40 years ago,” he wrote. The point is focus in a time when mobile technology is dramatically and quickly changing the computing world, said Holzle. The move is part of a massive “spring cleaning” that Google began in 2011 and which has nuked about 70 of its wide array of products. Users wanting to port their content to another RSS (rich site summary) feed can use Google Takeout to move it over the next four months.

“While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined,” Holzle wrote. In an age of Facebook posts and retweets, Google Senior Vice President Urs Holzle said in a post on the official Google blog that Reader was losing popularity. Google Reader, one of the best-known feeds through which users can pull together their favorite Web content in one place, will be shutting down, the company announced.

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