Like a Dagger to Bloggers' Hearts, Google Just Killed Google Reader

Journalists and geeks united in exasperation on Wednesday evening when Google made a very sad announcement: The company is shuttering Google Reader. We should've seen this coming. And those that didn't see the inevitable death of Google's RSS feed organizer and reader might've easily missed the news, since Google buried it halfway down an official blog post about a bunch of other stuff. But it is true. The search giant will pronounce Reader dead on July 1, 2013. Based on the somewhat storied history of Google killing Reader features, though, we're pretty sure someone will start working on an alternative within the next few hours.

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Again, this shouldn't be a surprise. Google Reader's been staring death in the face at least since the fall of 2011, when the company shut down the products social features. People were pissed. A few days later, a community of Google Reader devotees called Sharebros that used the service like a social network started their protest in earnest and actually showed up outside of Google's offices at one point. It took Google a few days to respond to the outrage, and when it explained that neutering Reader of its social features would help the company's engineers "build an even better experience across all of Google." The Sharebros took things into their own hands at that point, and one Sharebro named Francis Cleary actually started to build his own Reader replacement. Last we heard, it was still in development with Cleary as the sole developer.

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The shuttering of Reader is sure to bring even more people out of the woodwork. Twitter, for one, is furious. Twitter is also, arguably, the reason that Google Reader will no longer exist. We're pretty sure things will calm down once everyone realizes that Google Reader is not the only RSS feed in the world. We hear Feedly is a perfect fine alternative. On the same token, we doubt we'll stop hearing about this for a few days. This is just the beginning: