RIP Google Reader

Today, Google Reader is no more.

The reason for that is directly correlated to the fact its passing will go unnoticed by most people who ever set up the service to funnel RSS feeds from Web sites, news blogs, and other publishers. For them, if there is any reaction, it may be the heart-lightening realization that another box cluttered with neglected items is neatly wiped away.

But still, this sunset leaves an impassioned cohort of Google Reader fans in the dark, nearly eight years after the service's dawn.

"This is a sad day," CNET reader trhoads82 wrote in March when Google announced the coming demise for Reader. "I won't switch to anything else. It just means I won't take the time to go to each site to read my content each day."

Here's how Google had heralded the birth of the service in 2005.

"The amount of information on the Web is rapidly increasing," Google said on the day of the site's launch. "Google Reader helps you keep up with it all by organizing and managing all the content you're interested in. Instead of continuously checking your favorite sites for updates, you can let Google Reader do it for you."

It embodied Google's stated mission of organizing the world's information, and it matured into one of the most popular ways of tracking a swath of sites. It was also an early experiment for Google in social networking.

But Google Reader's relevance to the Web-going public eroded with the rising tide of Facebook and Twitter. That tidal shift to other social-networking sites hurt Google Reader, but not as much as Google's own reaction to the networking competition.