Google Reader Shutting Down July 1; Thousands Petition To Keep Popular RSS Reader

Google Reader, one of the world’s most-used RSS readers, is shutting down, Google announced Wednesday. It will officially be powered down on July 1, 2013.

The shut down of reader is part of Google’s spring cleaning, which began in 2011, with the goal of making Google products simpler for users and improving the overall Google experience. Counting the Google Reader shut down, the company has discontinued or merged with other products, a total of 70 services.

Google Reader was launched in 2005 with the objective to make it easier for people to discover and keep tabs of their favorite websites. The product has found a cult following, particularly amongst content creators, journalists and other professionals involve in monitoring and processing large amounts of data and information.

Hours after the announcement, a few online petitions to save the service had received thousands of signatures. More than 46,000 people had signed the petition “Google: Keep Google Reader Running” on online petition site Change.org.

One of Google’s software engineers, Alan Green, posted on the official Google Reader Blog that to provide a smooth transition for its current users, the company is providing a three-month sunset period. It is to give users time to find an alternative feed-reading solution. Users interested in keeping the data on their Google Reader are invited to do so through Google Takeout.

Google Takeout is a project by the Google Data Liberation Front that allows users of Google Products, like Google Reader, to export their data to a downloadable zip file.

Readers and RSS feeds in general remain popular amongst very active and Web-savvy users. They rely on these web utilities to pull the best of the Internet in a unified easy-to-read stream. However, they have never gained traction amongst casual Internet users. Google also notes that the usage of the service has declined and Google believes that focusing on other products will make for a better Google experience.

The reader is also not an effective revenue source for the technology giant. Google has never tried to place ads on Reader or make money from its use.