Google just revealed plans to shut down eight of its services as part of what it’s calling an ongoing spring cleaning effort. Some of them are pretty arcane, but among TechCrunch writers, anyway, we’re pretty bummed to see that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1.
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Scooped by
Guillaume Decugis
onto Content curation trends |

This will probably come as a shock for the loyal fan base of Google Reader but "the Google" is shutting it down. I'm biased of course but I'm not surprised.
As Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch put it, RSS keeps playing an important role in the "backend plumbing for many web and mobile apps" and it surely introduced many of us to the idea of real-time content feeds. But with social media taking over, RSS readers have been outgrown on many fronts:
- by social networks that brought serendipidty and discovery
- by more beautiful readers like Flipboard and Pulse
- by smarter and more relevant ways to filter information such as Prismatic or our own content suggestions
- and by more integrated ways to combine content discovery and curation like Pinterest, Tumblr or our own Scoop.it platform
I can not help but think this comes right when our own Read.it iPad App - our interest-based reader that just launched last week - made it to the home page of the App Store and within the Top 15 of its category. This is just an experiment for us right now but the simple fact of having it picked up and promoted by Apple is a nice acknowledgment of the role that community of curators like Scoop.it's can have in organizing the Web on a long-tail of interests in a much better way than algorithms, social networks or... RSS.
I've started to pay more attention to Zite and ScoopIt just for this reason. Google reader was expansive. The downside, social media and apps can easily create filter bubbles instead of the mosaic scan that Reader could facilitate.
Here's a reference about that:
Being out in the world, taking a break from your tech, can help the balance. Just make sure to do a bubble check for some diverse thinking, from time to time.
~ D
Still loved the reader myself!