The Google Reader was the Google’s first application to use another now defunkt Google software: Google Gears – a special Chrome browser extension, which allowed applications to run offline as well. Labels could also be added and sorted, and certain articles could be tagged as “Starred items” to be remembered for later. Filtering and sorting could be done by date or relevance. Users could add feeds through the reader’s search engine or by adding a feed URL directly. In the former option only the title is visible, and in the latter both title and description were visible

Displaying the latest items together with a brief summary.It had a very compact information dense design. Some of the extra and very handy features the reader offered included: InterfaceĪ designer of Google Reader described its purpose as a “river of news”. Who created a petition that received over 100,000 signatures.

The shutdown caused an uproar from users. The primary purpose of Google Reader was following blogs and news outlets for updates. Google did not see a future in this type of reader and did not make enough money to motivate continued support. Created by the Google engineer Chris Whetherell in 2005. Google Reader is a now defunct RSS feed reader.

Google feeder