Google's second round of spring cleaning: Reader, 7 other products to close - Firstpost

In a blog post yesterday Google announced its second round of Spring Cleaning and with it comes the death of Google Reader, one of the most popular RSS feed aggregator. To read about the online petitions to save Google Reader, click here. Google is also axing some other products. Here is the full list from the blogpost. Apps Script will be deprecating the GUI Builder and five UiApp widgets in order to focus efforts on Html Service. The rest of the Ui Service will not be affected. The GUI Builder will continue to be available until September 16, 2013.  CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers, and will be shut down for other developers on September 16, 2013. Most developers' use cases are handled well by Google Calendar API, which we recommend using instead.  Google Building Maker helped people to make three-dimensional building models for Google Earth and Maps. It will be retired on June 1, but users are still able to access and export their models from the 3D Warehouse. We'll continue to expand the availability of comprehensive and accurate new 3D imagery on Google Earth, and people can still use Google Map Maker to add building information such as outlines and heights to Google Maps. Google Cloud Connect is a plug-in to help people work in the cloud by automatically saving Microsoft Office files from Windows PCs in Google Drive. But installing Google Drive on your desktop achieves the same thing more effectively—and Drive works not only on Windows, but also on Mac, Android and iOS devices. Existing users will no longer be able to use Cloud Connect as of April 30.  Google Reader logo. Image from Wikimedia We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months. Beginning next week, we're ending support for the Google Voice App for Blackberry. For Blackberry users who want to continue using Google Voice, we recommend they use our HTML5 app, which is more secure and easier for us to keep up to date. Our HTML5 site is compatible with users with Blackberry version 6 and newer. We're deprecating our Search API for Shopping, which has enabled developers to create shopping apps based on Google's Product Search data. While we believe in the value this offering provided, we're shifting our focus to concentrate on creating a better shopping experience for users through Google Shopping. We'll shut the API down completely on September 16, 2013. Beginning today we'll no longer sell or provide updates for Snapseed Desktop for Macintosh and Windows. Existing customers will continue to be able to download the software and can contact us for support. We'll continue to offer the Snapseed mobile app on iOS and Android for free.  Of all these products, the loss of Google Reader has clearly hit users the hardest. The Product will close down from 1 July, 2013 and if you want to get export your data from Google Reader, you can click here. The death of traditional RSS readers has been an ongoing process thanks to the rise of apps like Flipboard, Pulse, Zite to name a few. However the death of Reader is also a big problem for other third party apps that rely on Reader for syncing.  Feedly is one such app. In fact Feedly it seems was prepared for this. In a blogpost, it wrote, Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting for some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless. Reader actually began with Blogger. As this post on Wired points out, In the summer of 2004, Jason Shellen — who had come to Google with the Blogger acquisition — was working on Google's Atom specification. He asked a Blogger engineer Chris Wetherell if it would be possible to build an in-browser XML-parser to make sense of all these feeds. This little tool became Google Reader. Shellen liked the product, but couldn't get the go-ahead from Google to launch it under its social program, so he took it to Marissa Mayer, who was running Google's consumer web services. Mayer gave Reader the green-light–provided the team would strip out its social features. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNE6_lE1_JJP391P4ygDTcHm1AkgNg&url=http://www.firstpost.com/tech/googles-second-round-of-spring-cleaning-reader-7-other-products-to-close-660990.html

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