Few days ago, Google officially announced the coming death of its good-old “Google Reader”, which they’re planning to shutdown on 1st July as a part of their “Spring Cleaning”. Most people went crazy over this news, and it started trending on Twitter and Google+ for days bringing up debates among users. Some even started petitions to force Google to keep this service alive. But, it was too late because Google Reader was already dead.
I was surprised to see people panicking over this. As far as I’m concerned, RSS died years ago when social networks were introduced to the Internet. To this day, I’ve never really used Google Reader or any other RSS readers. Most of the time I use Twitter lists and Facebook interest lists to check on updates from my favorite blogs. It was easier, faster and less time consuming than browsing RSS feeds.
I know some of you will disagree with me on this because most bloggers and readers have been using RSS readers for years. But, you will be surprised to know the number of people who have never even heard about Google Reader. I really don’t see a reason to use a RSS reader when we can curate content from blogs directly via social networks easily.
Google said via its’ official blog, that they’ve made this decision to kill most of these useless features to focus on “building great products”, because obviously, “we’re living in a new kind of computing environment”.
However, If you were a regular user of Google Reader, do not panic. There are great alternatives out there like Feedly that you can use to read RSS feeds. Check out ZDnet’s post for more info about those alternatives.
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Roshan Jerad Perera
