Earlier in the week Google announced that Reader would be shutting down as of July 1, 2013. Since that point we have seen a bit of uproar from die-hard users. It seems that Google Reader has a fairly loyal bunch of users. So much so that we have seen a “Keep Google Reader Running” petition launch.
The petition is not the surprising part, but instead the part about how quickly people have been willing to sign. Well within the first day of the news that petition crossed the 50,000 signature mark and coming as of now — the petition has crossed the 100,000 mark. In addition to the fast rise of signatures, we also heard a bit from Brian Shih who is now the former Google Reader Product Manager who seems to have blamed it on Google+ and social sharing.
In a statement provided to TNW, a Google spokesperson has said they have “given an overview of our reasoning and plans on our blog posts on the Official Google Blog and the Google Reader blog.” Google seems to have kept clear of discussing the petition which sort of suggests that Reader will shut down as expected regardless of the amount of signatures it receives.
On that note, while July 1 is still several months away, we suggest those who rely on Google Reader (ourselves included) begin making other plans. We recently made some suggestions in this post and we encourage those reading to continue on to the comments as there were some additional suggestions from other readers.
[via Change.org]
My plan is to start using Bing and iOS.
Seriously? This is just overkill. Personally, I prefer Feedly, an excellent option and you can grab all your Reader feeds and move them over.
The problem is: Google already knows precisely how many people are using Google Reader regularly. If every one of those users signed the petition, what difference would it make?
Fuck you, Google.