Google Reader shutting down

[foxfirefey]

Google is shutting Google Reader down July 1stt--many people used it as a reading page for the wider internet. It was a very efficient way to consume lots of data from many sources in a way much faster and more reliable than Twitter, Facebook, G+, or other social media.

Some talk about how Google Reader destroyed the ecosytem around it--it was good and free and thus cut the legs out from under its competitors. Yonatan Zunger, a project lead at Google, made a G+ post asking people what they liked so much about Reader. He quickly received 500 comments (consisting of about 53,000 words) in commentary. Some are lamenting the loss of private reading. (Others might disagree their Reader use was private, except that Google killed built in Reader sharing two years ago.) Some are positioning the shutdown of Google Reader as a threat to the internet and acknowledging Google Reader's censorship busting power as something hard to replace. BuzzFeed says Google Reader still sends them more traffic than G+. Some people like to think Google is about to learn a tough lesson, but others disagree.

Comments

[brigid]

Thanks for this.

[foxfirefey]

You're welcome!

[ironed_orchid]

Thanks for these links.

[foxfirefey]

Glad to be of service!

[susanreads]

I started using Google Reader when Bloglines was being shut down. Later Bloglines was rebooted under new management, but by then I was used to GReader. I'd like to reduce my dependence on Google, but inertia is a thing. Maybe I'll go and see whether Bloglines is still there and still free ... does anybody have any other suggestions?

[brigid]

I'm looking at both feedly (which is loading so slowly as to be unusable for me, but that's due to the influx of new users) and Old Reader (which is based on google reader's old format and lets you follow other people's feeds, but which apparently you can't group stuff into categories/folders which I kind of need).