

Most recently it's done the same with the company's biggest push into social networking to date, Google+, which competes strongly with Facebook but doubles as a news reader itself. It did the same with Buzz, Google's highly controversial and now-defunct social service. Google also integrated its Google Talk chat service into Reader, automatically sharing stories viewed in Reader to others on chat lists. It was the first to make use of Gears, the company's technology for making Web apps and services available offline, which was later shelved. Over the years Reader has served as a virtual science lab integrating other Google products. As Google's social networking efforts turned to Google+, many predicted Google Reader's days were numbered. RSS became the infrastructure powering highly visual apps like Flipboard, Zite and Google's own Currents, leaving the bare-bones Reader looking outdated. Facebook, Twitter and other social sites proved more adept at luring mainstream users to share and read links.
GOOGLE READER ALTERNATIVES 2016 ANDROID
Instead of continuously checking your favorite sites for updates, you can let Google Reader do it for you."īut tracking news through RSS never gained the scale of core Google products like search, maps, Android and YouTube. "Google Reader helps you keep up with it all by organizing and managing all the content you're interested in. "The amount of information on the Web is rapidly increasing," Google said the day of the site's launch. Diehard fans of the service called themselves " sharebros," as was detailed last year in a lengthy, definitive feature on Buzzfeed. It was also an early experiment for Google in social networking, as the service's sharing features inspired friendships and even marriages.

Loved by information junkies, the nearly eight-year-old service was once among the most popular ways of tracking large numbers of news sites, blogs and other publishers. Google Reader lets users subscribe to and read feeds from all manner of publishers, in a format that resembles an e-mail in-box.
