Google Reader
What Happened
Google Reader launched in October 2005 as a simple way to follow the open web through RSS feeds. Power users, journalists, bloggers, and developers made it the central hub of their information diet — a single place to read every site they cared about, synced across devices.
For nearly eight years it grew a devoted community. It shaped how a generation consumed content online, turned RSS into a mainstream concept, and quietly became the backbone that fed hundreds of other apps and third-party clients.
On March 13, 2013, Google announced Reader would shut down on July 1, citing declining usage. The announcement sparked one of the largest public protests of a product shutdown in Google's history. Petitions crossed hundreds of thousands of signatures. Competitors like Feedly scrambled to import users by the millions in a single week.
On July 1, 2013, Google Reader went dark. The open web lost its town square. Many argue RSS as a mainstream consumer product never recovered — and that Google's decision accelerated the shift toward closed, algorithmic feeds owned by social platforms.