Google Reader has expired, but your data lives until July 15
The popular RSS reader has been powered down, but there are still a few weeks to stop by and grab your stuff.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
By now you probably already know that Google Reader has crossed over into the digital netherworld, joining many of its ill-fated Mountain View kin who were doomed never to exit beta.
When these sad departures occur, the ritual of going through the deceased's basement begins, and in the case of Google Reader it turns out that the place was full of lots of digital detritus belonging to you and me, and hundreds of thousands (if not millions -- we never really found out how popular Google Reader was in definite terms) of users.
In order to continue the grieving process and move on, therefore, Google has set a deadline for us to stop by and pick up all our old stuff from Reader. In a brief blog post that went up shortly after Reader finally went dark at the end of Monday, the Reader team points to a page full of RSS reader alternatives and asks users to download a copy of their favorite feeds and other Google Reader data via Google Takeout before it gets permanently deleted from Google servers on July 15.
So that's it, the final sunset for a product that's sure to be sorely missed. Unless, of course, you're one of the people like me who switched to Feedly a month ago and realized that you were actually missing out on better things by sticking with a big name product like Google Reader that had grown stagnant.
But one should not speak ill of the dead. So just please stop by and pick up your stuff sometime in the next two weeks.