Goodbye Google Reader

GoogleReaderApparently, I have 51 subscribers to my RSS feed (it’s that link at the very bottom on my blog) through Google Reader.

If you don’t already know, an RSS feed is a way to monitor a website without having to visit it directly. This is handy if you have a bunch of things like blogs or webcomics that update sporadically that you want to keep track of. Just add all their RSS feeds to your RSS aggregator and then each day, you can just check that one place to see what’s new.

Sadly, one of the most popular RSS aggregators, Google Reader, is going away. I chatted with a friend at Google about it and she speculated that it was because it didn’t have over a million subscribers and with an upcoming overhaul of some of the infrastructure it relied on, it wasn’t deemed worth the effort to update it. She also felt that it might be a good way for other RSS aggregator services to thrive in the market.

So if you’re one of the 51 people who checks out my blog through Google Reader, I hope you stick around through one of the other aggregators. One of my friends recommended Feedly and it seems pretty good so far.

2 Responses to “Goodbye Google Reader”

  1. Kat Says:

    Hi Mach,
    There’s a discussion of the demise of Google Reader in this podcast here: http://www.muleradio.net/mistakes/86/ with one of the developers of it. He provides some history of the feed reader, and it’s a great listen if you’re that sort of geek.

    Personally, I’m giving http://www.newsblur.com a whirl. We’ll see how it goes.

  2. Mach Says:

    Between my super slow internet connection and having to wrangle Dyson on the weekend, I haven’t had a chance to listen to the whole podcast but what I’ve heard so far has been fascinating.