This knocked me nearly off my chair… Google is actually killing off its RSS reader on July 1. Well, they say, that RSS is a dead format and nobody uses it anymore, but why are nearly all websites and blogs still offering a RSS feed? It’s in every kind of blog and content managing software and a brilliant way to keep on track with many websites at the same time. I’ve been using RSS since my early days on the Palm PDAs to read my news offline and after moving to an Android tablet last year, I finally switched to Google Reader and the great Android app gReader. And now it’s all supposed to end on July 1? Hopefully not!

Maybe it’s selfish to say, but I actually don’t care about the Google Reader itself. I have only used the web interface to sort the feeds and I do all the reading on the tablet, so I’m not really dependent on Google’s RSS aggregator itself. I don’t like to live in the cloud and I haven’t chosen Google Reader for this reason, but the app I have found to read my RSS feeds on my tablet just happens to use Google Reader. However, it seems that the RSS world is not goint to end in the middle of the summer – Digg has already said that they are building a replacement with a compatible API, the maker of gReader seems to be working on an alternative and a couple of other RSS aggregators seem to be ready to jump into the gap.

What is actually sad is the behaviour of Google – what they call “spring cleaning” is actually a massive disappointment for a company who says that they care about their users and who want to be the good guys. There’s already a petition going on with more than 97.000 100.000 signatures, but I’m not sure if this is going to change Google’s mind. But this is not the occasion to do a “rage quit” and say Google is evil! Don’t use Google’s services! – this kind of gut reaction has never led to anything. After all, Google Reader is a FREE service and if they choose to shut it down, they are in the full right to do so. No, it’s not particularly nice towards the users, but they are not terminating a paid contract. So it’s best to calm down and see what the next months will bring – at least they had the decency to give everyone a few months notice!