English: Google Logo officially released on May 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Everyone Joining TheOldReader and Feedly after Google Reader Announcement

Google Reader will be closing at the beginning on July, current users found out just this week from a message when they logged into their accounts. The reader is very popular with bloggers and those in the media for reading stories coming from varied sources in one location. In addition, bloggers like to keep readers connected through Google Reader and Google Feedburner’s email subscribe options. With the lose of the reader, blogs might have a drop-off in readership some fear. Google is making the move in hopes that users with jump to Google+ and receive their daily news from the feed their. But the two products aren’t the same and users and instead moving to TheOldReader and Feedly, two services similar to Google Reader.

Google Reader shares, where you flag something as interesting for your friends to read, has fallen out of favor with Facebook Likes, Twitter retweets, and Google +1s. Mainstream users, non-technical users, never adopted Google Reader even though the service is superior for what it provides. Those non-technical users went to Facebook where they catch short posts from their friends about random items instead of long informative articles about the news and relevant topics that you have subscribed to. The service hasn’t been updated since 2011 allowing TheOldReader to now have the same functionality as the current Reader. Both TheOlderRead along with Newsblur and Feedly have had big gains in user counts since the Google shutdown was announcement. TheOldReader has a queue of 5000+ users waiting for their Google Reader export to import. for instance.

If you are a blogger, it is a good time to inform your readers of the change and make suggestions for them to use a different service or services. If they are subscribed by email through Feedburner, have them sign-up to you’re Aweber email list. Have them follow your Twitter account, like your Facebook page, and all the other ways that you are currently syndicating your content.