Google pulls the plug on news story service ‘Reader’

Google yesterday pulled the plug on its free news story service' Reader', that gathered headlines and articles for users' favourite websites into a single place.

With increasing use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter for updates, Google's Reader had hit the point of declining returns.

The withdrawal of the service would come as no surprise given that usage had declined since Reader made its debut in 2005.

Instead RSS feeds (really simple syndication) allowed users to keep track of multiple websites without having to visit each and every one. Content came to users through readers like Google Reader. Facebook and Twitter though are now performing a similar role in trawling content.

As while Google has withdrawi its Reader, the latest update to the Digg iPhone app comes with the app Digg Reader, the brand-new RSS feed reader from Digg that showed a lot of promise, but was still in the beta stage.

The reader itself had a few limitations, one had to  have a Google account, for example, and it did not support OPML uploads, though it had started off on the right note and looked great on the iPhone.

The main part of the Digg iPhone app has nothing remarkable about it and is in fact, very much downplayed the moment users start a Digg Reader account.

In short a home screen displays popular Digg news stories in a scrollable view, with stories appearing with a headline and image, and a count showing how many "Diggs" (essentially "likes") a story received. Users could open the story to read it, or swipe right to left across the story to access other functions, including bookmarking it to read later, or sharing it via email, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth.

Left-to-right swipes, on the other hand, returned users to Digg Reader, proving just how integral the feature was to the Digg now.

What some RSS fans would be pleased to know is that Digg Reader also integrated with Pocket, Readability, and Instapaper, all services that made it easier to read long-form content in particular when offline. Users could manage their connections to these services right from within the settings of the Digg iPhone app and it was totally appropriate, as those services were really designed to improve reading experiences on small devices, such as the iPhone.