Skip to footer

Google Reader to retire on July 1

But not everyone wants Google Reader to fade into the sunset. 

|
Google
Time to wave goodbye to Google Reader.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Citing declining usage, Google has announced that it will shutter Google Reader, an RSS application that made it easy to aggregate and sort news from various Web sources. The Reader platform will be officially retired on July 1, Google says. 

"We’re living in a new kind of computing environment," Google's Urs Hölzle wrote in a blog post this week. "Everyone has a device, sometimes multiple devices. 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. To make the most of these opportunities, we need to focus – otherwise we spread ourselves too thin and lack impact." 

But as Mr. Hölzle noted in the post, Google Reader still has a "loyal" following, and plenty of users seem unwilling to go gently into that good night. Consider this petition, started by a guy named Dan Lewis, which already has 44,000 signatories (h/t TechCrunch). 

"Our confidence in Google's other products – Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus – requires that we trust you in respecting how and why we use your other products," Mr. Lewis writes. "This isn't just about our data in Reader. This is about us using your product because we love it, because it makes our lives better, and because we trust you not to nuke it." 

Not everyone agrees. Over at ZD Net, Christopher Dawson argues that RSS is a dinosaur – an antiquated feature of a Web that has changed mightily in recent years. 

"RSS readers don't exactly lend themselves [to the] sorts of conversations that happen quite naturally on social media (including social bookmarking/linking sites like Reddit)," Mr. Dawson writes. "These conversations add a great deal of value to what we find on the Web and help build context in overwhelming volumes of information."

Bottom line, Dawson concludes: In the year 2013, "we can reasonably expect every service we use to be social, personalized (preferably automatically), and look great on mobile. And Google Reader just wasn't cutting the mustard." 

Five years ago, we got a lot of our news by scanning the headlines or accessing an RSS feed, these days, we rely much more on Twitter and Facebook, which often lead us to stories or reports that we would never have found otherwise. That's the beauty of the social web, and something Google Reader was never particularly good at providing. 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Google Reader to retire on July 1
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0314/Google-Reader-to-retire-on-July-1
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe