Goodbye Google Reader

This week Google announced that it will retire Google Reader as of July 1, 2013.  Reader was Google’s web-based program that let people subscribe to news feeds from their favorite sites. According to the Official Google Blog, the reason for shuttering the service is declining usage. I foresaw the demise of Reader back in 2011, when Google dropped Reader's ability to natively share and moved that feature to Google+.

As recently as 2011, Google Reader was always open on my desktop, and I checked it several times a day. Now most of my "breaking news" comes from Twitter, so I am not freaking out over the shutdown like some people who have started a petition to keep Google Reader running. If the petition fails, there are several alternative RSS readers out there, and I think I am going to give The Old Reader a try.