Three Months to Scale NewsBlur - The NewsBlur Blog. At 4:16pm last Wednesday I got a short and to-the-point email from Nilay Patel at The Verge with only a link that started with the host “googlereader.blogspot.com”. The sudden spike in NewsBlur’s visitors immediately confirmed — Google was shutting down Reader. Late night at the office I had been preparing for a black swan event like this for the last four years since I began NewsBlur. With the deprecation of their social features a year ago I knew it was only a matter of time before Google stopped supporting Reader entirely. I did not expect it to come this soon. As the Storify history of the Reader-o-calypse, NewsBlur suffered a number of hurdles with the onslaught of new subscribers. I was able to handle the 1,500 users who were using the service everyday, but when 50,000 users hit an uncachable and resource intensive backend, unless you’ve done your homework and load tested the living crap out of your entire stack, there’s going to be trouble brewing.
The sad extent of my St. It’s Not Just Reader – Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension, Too. Oh Google. Thought we wouldn’t notice that you’re trying to kill off not just Google Reader, but also your support and endorsement for the RSS format itself? People have just started noticing that Google’s own RSS Subscription Chrome browser extension has disappeared from the Google Chrome Web Store.
Though it’s unclear at this time exactly when the extension was removed, the change appears to be recent. The extension, which previously placed a small, orange RSS icon next to the website’s URL in the Chrome address bar, no longer functions even on Chrome browsers where the extension is installed and enabled. Upon clicking the icon, users used to be able to quickly subscribe to that website’s feed in their preferred RSS reader, such as Google Reader, which, of course is now shutting down for good.
It’s interesting that the extension has been removed ahead of the end date for Google Reader, since up until that time, Reader’s core audience will likely still be subscribing to new feeds. Yonatan Zunger - Google+ - I have a question for avid Google Reader users: what are… The End of FeedDemon. This is a hard post for me to write. I've used FeedDemon every day since I created it back in 2003 - it's part of my daily workflow, the first thing I turn to after pouring myself a cup of coffee in the morning. I've thoroughly enjoyed working on it and I'm grateful for all of the people who paid for it over the years despite free alternatives.
But it's time for FeedDemon to die. If you're an avid FeedDemon user, you probably know that I've struggled to keep it updated. FeedDemon stopped "paying the bills" a while ago, so I took a full-time job elsewhere and haven't been able to give FeedDemon the attention it deserves. Then today came the news that Google Reader is shutting down on July 1.
That was the nail in the coffin for me. If you're using FeedDemon without Google Reader synchronization, it will continue to work beyond July 1. I'm truly sad to see FeedDemon go - it's been so much fun working on it, using it, and engaging with other people that use it. The Death Of Google Reader Sparks A Petition 30,000 Signatures Strong. Google announced yesterday that it would shut down Google Reader, Google’s RSS feed reading product, on July 1. In response, an online petition was started by Daniel Lewis (no relation) asking the search giant to let Reader live. As of the time of writing, the petition already has over 30,000 signatures. There are over 100 comments on this post about the Google Readerpocalypse, and the original article on TechCrunch announcing the death of our beloved Google RSS reader has over 200 comments. And this in a world where no one cares about RSS? Perhaps the group of people who use a dedicated feed reading service comprise just a small corner of the internet’s population.
But I’d also like to think that if Google left Reader’s social integration alone, which let users share to Facebook and Twitter directly from their Reader, things might be a bit different. As Mr. But Google, in its quest to do no evil, decided the only social integration necessary on Reader was Google+. Come on, Google.