July 1, 2013
Today, Google is shutting down its popular RSS service Google Reader. Over at Gizmodo, Eric Limer about the effect the popular service had on him personally:
Every day I bounce between dozens of sites, each with its own purpose, its own content, its own look and feel. But inside Google Reader, the Internet—the carefully curated Internet I built, pruned, and tweaked—comes to me. And, more often than not, I don’t even have to leave its comfortingly familiar little interface to ingest what my little intranet has to offer. At its best, it’s my virtual study, a private reading room. At its worst, it’s a closet with a slop bucket on the floor. But it’s still my slop bucket close. Or it was.
It’s equally strange and accurate to say Googs and I were intimately familiar. I’ve barely been a working blogger for two years, and yet hastily scrawled napkin math suggests that I’ve spent upwards of 1,000 hours at www.google.com/reader. I’ve spent more time with Google Reader than I have with some humans I consider to be friends. In a weird sort of way, it feels like I grew up there.
Meanwhile, for those who have come to rely on Google Reader for their news fixes, Slate’s Chris Kirk has put together a hand flowchart to help you pick out the best replacement.