![]() If the reasons are purely for financial gains, what is the next Google product that we should fear losing? Gmail? FeedBurner? FeedBurner APIs were deprecated May 26th, 2011 and shut down October 20th, 2012. They have had no development to FeedBurner in years and they removed the ability to place Google AdSense ads in FeedBurner feeds in December 2012. The fact that Google can remain actively developing Google+ while a product like Google Reader with an established user base is canned with 3 months eviction notice does tell a bit about their motivations. Google’s desire to focus may be entirely business-oriented, they haven’t been entirely forward on that since Larry Page returned to CEO replacing Eric Schmidt. Users of Google Reader were very verbal of their dislike for the changes and the loss of functionality yet Google made no accommodations to compromise despite over 13,000 signatures to a petition. The product is used less because Google’s update back in October 2011 to include Google+ design made Google Reader less useful. While content updates have found more favor in Twitter, Facebook, and other social media venues, Google is far from blameless in that regard. They blame declining usage of Google Reader as the reason the product should be retired in addition to the company’s attempt to focus on fewer products. The official Google Reader blog apologized in a blog post today that devoted followers will be sad to see it go and they too will be sad. On the topic of ecosystems, the real shame of losing Google Reader is that it has run other applications and services like Bloglines out of the market and kept new ones from entering. Unfortunately, their ecosystem has been one of the things that makes them great. It seems they wish to streamline the company and reduce the number of products they offer. Google has been in a spring cleaning frenzy since 2011. For one thing, it should not be a surprise. There are a few interesting topics to take on the quick retirement of Google Reader. An RSS feed reader is just the interface to view and organize those feeds. Instead of having to remember to visit a website regularly to see if there is new content, you can rely on its RSS feed to be automatically updated to stay current. RSS feeds, as I covered in my RSS Feed Basics and Advanced RSS articles, allow a person a very simple format to keep up with a website and the content that is produced. Apps Script’s GUI Builder, and five UiApp widgets, CalDAV API, Google Building Maker, Google Cloud Connect, Google Voice App for Blackberry, Search API for Shopping, and Snapseed Desktop for Macintosh and Windows were all listed for closure in today’s announcement. In another round of Spring Cleaning, Google announced today that Google Reader will be retired on July 1st, 2013 and a number of other services will also be shuttered. ![]()
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