Late on Wednesday, Google announced that as part of one of its occasional "spring cleaning" of projects, it would shut down the Google Reader RSS feed website on July 1st. Google"s reason for the closing of the site was that " ... over the years usage has declined."
Almost instantly after the announcement was made, Google Reader users took to posting their displeasure of this decision on Twitter and Facebook. An online petition on the Change.org website asking Google to reconsider their decision has already generated over 35,000 online signatures as of this writing.
At the same time, other RSS feed services are experiencing a lot of new activity as Google Reader users move their RSS subscriptions over to new sites. One of them is Feedly, which indicated on their blog site that they have been anticipating that Google would shut down Google Reader for a while. Feedly uses a plug in for Chrome and Firefox web browsers in addition to offering free iOS and Android apps.
The blog stated:
We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.
Feedly has apparently already experienced a lot of new people signing up to join their service; in fact the company had to upgrade their bandwidth so it could handle the new subscribers.
You can also subscribe to our RSS feed here. /shamelessplug
Source: Change.org via: News.com | Image via Google