Official line
Declining usage as the web moved to social distribution.
Google · Media & Publishing · Product
Google Reader
Discontinued
2005–2013 · 8 years in market
Launched
Oct 7, 2005
Discontinued
Jul 1, 2013
Cause of death
Low usage
Evidence
High
What was it?
The RSS reader a generation of journalists and power users treated as a daily driver. Killed as RSS faded and Google chased social.
Why it died
Supported by a primary source
RSS threatened the ad-funded feed Google wanted people to live inside. A passionate minority was not a business.
Founder takeaway
A loud, loyal user base is not a moat. If a product sits off the main growth loop, it will be cut — migrate users before you announce the funeral.
Sources
High — primary source on file
What replaced it
Feedly
Feedly
Absorbed the power-user RSS diaspora.
Innologica
Inoreader
Kept the keyboard-first Reader ethos.
Related graves
Same company, category, or cause of death.
Feature
RIP
Google Moderator
2008–2015 · 7 yrs
Crowd-ranked questions for town halls and keynotes. Quietly useful, quietly killed.
Social/Low usage+36
Feature
RIP
Google Sidewiki
2009–2011 · 2 yrs
A browser sidebar for commenting on any page. The open web’s last annotation dream at Google.
Social/Low usage+35
RIP
Google Spaces
2016–2017 · 1 yr
A lightweight group chat with cards for links, photos, and polls. Lasted less than a year.
Messaging/Low usage+30
RIP
Fusion Tables
2009–2019 · 10 yrs
A friendly visualization layer on tabular data. Power-user niche, replaced in spirit by BigQuery + Looker.
Cloud & Infra/Low usage+21