Google will be ending its’ reader service (reader.google.com) on July 1st, according to the company, bringing to an end seven years of service. Google Reader is the service behind many of the top RSS apps in the world, pushing new content from saved feeds to RSS readers, and offering its’ own organized reader online.
Word comes as research shows the decline of the RSS feed. While the RSS has, or Really Simple Script protocol has gained a cult following among the technically savvy, the acronym scared many average consumers away. Services like Reddit, faster broadband speeds, and Twitter made news aggregators nearly obsolete, and RSS has been slowly losing the audience it already had.
Before July 1st you can still use the service, and download your data for import into a similar service, but unfortunately no alternative comes close to the quality of Google Reader.