Google to shut down reader in July

Google has announced yet another spring cleaning of its various services, and this time around, the company is giving the axe to its Google Reader RSS aggregator, The Verge reported.

The service, which originally launched back in 2005, will be officially put out to pasture on July 1st, 2013.

Reader has gone through a number of iterations, but it had not been significantly updated in a long time. The last time that Google updated the product, it built in integration for the Google+ social network and removed Reader's own native sharing service, causing a bit of a backlash with die hard users. Google is offering users a way to export their Reader content, including lists of users that they follow and starred and liked articles.


In addition to killing off Reader, beginning next week Google is ending support for the Google Voice app for BlackBerry smartphones, instead pointing users toward the HTML5 webapp. The company will no longer sell or update the desktop versions of its Snapseed photo editing app, and a number of other developer APIs are also being killed off.