Why Google Killed Google Reader

I still miss Google Reader. For a fwe years, it was my primary interface to the internet because it made it possible to quickly scan through a tremendous volume of news and web posts in much less time than it would take to visit individual sites. 

I've always wondered why Google killed it off, and this article from the Verge explains why, or at least provides the gory details of what happened. 

Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

A decade later, the people who worked on Reader still look back fondly on the project. It was a small group that built the app not because it was a flashy product or a savvy career move — it was decidedly neither — but because they loved trying to find better ways to curate and share the web. They fought through corporate politics and endless red tape just to make the thing they wanted to use. They found a way to make the web better, and all they wanted to do was keep it alive.

RSS feed readers have not gone away, thank goodness, although with the fragmentation of the web into (sometimes paywalled) niches, the number  of sites that support RSS or Atom feeds has decreased. I use Feedly, which works well on both my desktop PC and phone. There are others. Here are a couple of review articles from Wired and Zapier that are reasonably current. If you aren't using a feed reader, I strongly recommend checking out Feedly or one of the other tools mentioned in the articles. You will wonder how you ever got along without one.