Google Reader

The web, in one place

Shut down
19902026

Google Reader was the dominant RSS feed reader of the late 2000s, launched on 7 October 2005. Google shut it down on 1 July 2013, citing declining usage during its "spring cleaning", a decision that killed the centre of the RSS ecosystem and became the canonical example of Google abandoning products.

Timeline

  1. 2005
  2. 7 October 2005 Launch
    Google Reader launches

    Web-based RSS aggregator from Google Labs.

  3. 2006
  4. 28 September 2006 Version
    Major redesign

    Unread counts, folders and sharing arrive; Reader graduates from experiment to daily tool.

  5. 2007
  6. September 2007 Version
    Graduates from Google Labs

    Reader becomes a first-class Google product.

  7. 2011
  8. 31 October 2011 Feature
    Social features removed in Google+ push

    Sharing and friends features replaced with +1; the community revolts.

  9. 2013
  10. 13 March 2013 Shutdown announced
    "A second spring of cleaning"

    Google announces Reader will retire on July 1, citing declining usage.

  11. March 2013 Incident
    Keep-Reader petition passes 100,000 signatures

    The shutdown becomes a case study in platform trust; the RSS ecosystem never fully recovers.

  12. 1 July 2013 Shutdown
    Google Reader shuts down

    Users had four months to export via Google Takeout.

Ownership

Google 2005–2013 Founded Built as a 20% project by Chris Wetherell's team

Why it shut down

Official line: Google: "usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we're pouring all of our energy into fewer products."

Our analysis: Reader was collateral damage of the Google+ push: a beloved power-user tool with no ad revenue, killed while Google chased Facebook. Its death fragmented the RSS ecosystem it had monopolised, and is still cited as the moment users stopped trusting Google products to live.

History

The RSS monopoly

Google Reader launched in October 2005, built by Chris Wetherell's team, and simply out-executed every other feed reader until it was RSS for most people. Journalists, researchers and power users lived in it; a whole ecosystem of apps synced against its API as the de facto standard.

Spring cleaning

On 13 March 2013 Google announced Reader would close on 1 July as part of its "second spring of cleaning", citing declining usage. The real context was the company-wide Google+ obsession: Reader's social features had already been stripped in 2011 to push sharing into Google+. The shutdown radicalised a generation of users: it proved a free Google product you depend on can vanish, coined "getting Kelleredy" jokes and the graveyard sites, and handed the market to Feedly and a dozen paid successors. RSS survived, but the single town square for it never came back.

Similar projects

GeoCities Your neighborhood on the early web 1994–2009 Adobe Flash The plugin that animated the web 1996–2020 MSN Messenger The sound of nudges after school 1999–2014

Sources

  1. A second spring of cleaning Google Official Blog 13 March 2013 [archived]
  2. Google Closes The Book On Google Reader On July 1 TechCrunch 13 March 2013 [archived]

Last verified: 11 August 2026