Earlier this year in March, as a part of its spring cleaning, Google announced that it would shut down its popular RSS aggregator Google Reader come July. Almost on cue, the Internet search giant has replaced the Reader homepage with a message announcing that the service has been officially discontinued.
In March, much to the disappointment of many, Google greeted its loyal users with the following message, “We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.”
It has today finally shut shop. Google though has seen to it that the transition is as smooth as possible. In addition to mentioning alternative readers available on the Internet today, Google has also revealed that all the Reader data will be available for users to download till July 15. The data will be on the Google servers and using Google Takeout, one can shift the data to other services. Google has warned though that after July 15, all the data will be irrevocably deleted.
