Google announced that it will be closing down a bunch of services, one of which is Google Reader which is arguably the most popular. It was originally established in 2005 and has been a solid RSS news feed for a lot of users.
Google Reader is a web-based RSS feed reader has been around for a while and it’s been appreciated, and used a lot by bloggers and journalists.
The good news is that you can use Google Takeout to export your data, which includes an XML file of your subscriptions, plus JSON files containing people you follow, people that follow you, things you’ve starred and shared.
One the Takeout page, just click Create Archive.
When the archive is ready, click Download and save it in a safe place on your computer, until you find another reader you’ll be using moving forward. This yet another perfect example of an important use of Google Takeout, a service that recently started allowing the download of Blogger data, too.
Our team will be testing out several alternatives to use and will have an article soon showing some of the best ones. If you know of a quality RSS reader that’s as good or better than Google Reader, leave a comment and tell us about it!
Dang…. This sucks. I still use it daily.
I’m going to miss it a lot, too.
For now I’ll be using Feedly. It will import all my feeds and “stars” from Reader automatically.
I haven’t made up my mind yet, to be honest.