Google Reader Says Goodbye

Posted on July 2, 2013

Google Reader has officially closed Google Reader. The service launched nearly eight years ago on October 7, 2005. It was developed by Google software engineer Chris Wetherell according to the Wikipedia entry.

Google bid farewell in a blog post that says "all subscription data will be permanently, and irrevocably deleted." The post also says you can still recover your data through July 15, 2013 using Google Takeout.

Some new RSS readers have been popping up. Digg has launched a new reader and so has AOL, the AOL Reader. Google's farewell post linked to this list of alternative readers. A reader named Feedly has been one of the more popular alternatives. It will be interesting to see how much feed subscribers fall to individual feeds following Google Reader's demise. Hopefully, the new readers will pick up the slack and RSS use will live on.