Last Friday, I was happily opening up my Google Reader to check up on feeds from work-related blogs and I was greeted by this message.

For those who are seeing this for the first time, yes, I asked myself the same question: Why?!

Google attributes the reason for “powering down” Google Reader due to the declining usage of the reader and focus their energy on fewer products. Well, they could have thought of that before coming up for multiple Google products. Apparently, over a million  users of Google Reader is not worth their effort to keep it running.

Nevertheless, alternatives to Google Reader have been popping up. One such RSS reader is Feedly which provides “seamless transition”  from Google Reader accounts and provides a magazine-style interface.

Over 500,000 Google Reader users have moved over to Feedly over the weekend. I tried it out over the weekend and took a liking to its sleek interface. However, I’m looking forward to some improvements. For instance, I prefer to save articles by using tags  in Google Reader.

What other features do you look forward to?

[ Image from Lewis Leong ]