This weekend through various social media channels I saw mention of Google’s decision to close its Google Reader service — to the chagrin of many users. The Next Web featured an article that says some 500,000 users began migrating to the Feedly service.
In this last year Google has made some pretty rapid changes to a number of services, Google Reader coming after other big ones like Feedburner and iGoogle for discontinued projects. At least for the time being the Feedburner service is still available (albeit with no support), but by the sounds of it the Reader service will be kaput in the next 30 days.
It could cause an interesting shift for bloggers, as many of their subscribers may have been using Google reader to keep up with their content. More users may opt for the email subscription format, and what effect that may or may not have on readership remains to be seen.
Google has seemed the proverbial man on a mission this last year, trimming the fat from its repertoire by discontinuing services that were not profitable or interesting (apparently). What’s always been cool about Google as a company is their variety of well designed tools available to everyone (and the way that enriched the web). “Spring Cleaning” (as they referred to it) is all well and good, but people will probably be watching with intrigue for awhile on other core services they may use every day.
Have you used Google Reader? What do you think about this?
Read More:
- Best Alternatives To Google Reader
- Google Reader Petition Gets Over 100,000 signatures
- Google RSS Aggragator Retired
