Google just revealed plans to shut down eight of its services as part of what it’s calling an ongoing spring cleaning effort. Some of them are pretty arcane, but among TechCrunch writers, anyway, we’re pretty bummed to see that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1.
“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites,” SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle writes in the blog post. “While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.”
As a result, we can probably expect another round of “RSS is dead” posts. RSS as a technology for publishers to distribute content probably isn’t going away anytime soon, but if nothing else, the comments about loyal-but-declining usage suggest that anyone hoping for RSS to become a significant consumer technology can stop hoping. And for folks who like to track lots of news sources, this really sucks. (Seriously, you should see the wailing and moaning in the TechCrunch chat room.)
Google’s declining interest in RSS was already pretty obvious given last fall’s shutdown of AdSense for feeds. At the time, TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois wrote:
大意google reader用户群下降，google 认为rss已死，有事烧纸
说实话，我觉得这玩意很方便啊，为什么google认为它过时了? 难道我们思想太落后了？
网友评论(15320533)2013-03-14 11:05
我就是个开发者啊，尼玛太坑爹了
----sent from my Samsung Galaxy Nexus,Android 4.2.2
