On March 13, 2013, Google announced the retirement of Reader in July.
“There are two simple reasons for this usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience” Official Google Reader Blog.

Source : http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/

But, according to data from BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news and much larger one than Google+. Nevertheless, this data isn’t complete. Google Reader traffic became much harder to measure last year when Google began to default users to SSL encryption in such a way that masked referral data.

Measured Reader and Google+ refill over time, the changes in Reader’s numbers can be explained mostly by the addition of new sites to Buzz Feed’s partner network, and not by the growth in Google Reader.

How Google killed Google Reader? Google goes deep into the mechanics of how Reader’s functionality enabled a community to develop and then crushed it. Someone argued that Google should take its existant communities and try to make them the core of its social offering rather than building G+ from scratch. At Buzz Feed’s FWD, there is a terrific epic about the lost social network that thrived within the admittedly narrow confines of the RSS application. “Google doesn’t get social” people always says, much news reading behavior has moved to social networks these days. Rather than finding a way to turn their most dedicated users into content creators for the larger masses of users, they just took their tools away, alienating a group that love their product. A G+ product with a huge nominal user base and a much, much, much smaller actual community.

A propos de Wenying Hu