???? – 2005retired
IBM ViaVoice
“It learned your voice sentence by sentence, then fell quiet.”
“It fed us the internet one feed at a time, until Google decided we were full.”
Google Reader was an RSS and Atom feed aggregator, born in early 2005 thanks to engineer Chris Wetherell and launched through Google Labs on 7 October 2005. It quietly became the way a certain kind of person read the internet — one tidy feed at a time, no noise, no algorithm, just the things you'd chosen to follow.
It grew popular enough that other programs leaned on it as a platform for serving news to users, which made the ending sting all the more. Google closed Reader on 1 July 2013, citing declining use. The fans kept the habit; they just had to find somewhere else to host it.
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“It learned your voice sentence by sentence, then fell quiet.”
“Tasman deserved better, and so did we.”
“Spotlight on, Dashboard glowing, gone before the Widgets even cooled”