The story
In early 2001, software engineer Chris Wetherell began a project he called "JavaCollect" that served as a news portal based on web feeds. After working at Google he began a similar project with a small team that launched an improved product on 7 October 2005, as Google Reader.
In September 2006, Google announced a redesign for Reader that included new features such as unread counts, the ability to "mark all as read", a new folder-based navigation, and an expanded view so users could quickly scan over several items at once. This also marked the addition of a sharing feature, which allowed readers to publish interesting items for others to see.
In January 2007, Google added video content from YouTube and Google Video to Reader.
In September 2007, product marketing manager Kevin Systrom (later, founder of Instagram) announced that Google Reader had graduated out of Google Labs.
Discontinuation
On 13 March 2013, Google announced they were discontinuing Google Reader, stating the product had a loyal but declining following, and they wanted to focus on fewer products. They gave users a sunset period until 1 July 2013, to move their data and suggested: "If you want to retain your Reader data, including subscriptions, you can do so through Google Takeout."
After the closure announcement, Feedly said that more than 500,000 new users had joined them in the following 48 hours, and 3 million in the following two weeks. Likewise, NewsBlur's subscriber base immediately rose from about 1,500 users to over 60,000.
In response to the planned closure, Digg also announced plans to build a Google Reader replacement, rebuilding its API and adding features to take advantage of the implicit recommendations of social network activity.
Several petitions were started to keep Google Reader running, including one on Change.org with over 100,000 signatures.
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Instapaper developer Marco Arment speculated that the real reason for the closure was to try to keep everyone reading and sharing information using the now defunct Google+, and that it signaled the end of the era of unrestricted and interoperable web services like RSS from large organizations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Enthusiasts re-created a work-alike replacement called "The Old Reader."
In 2022, Techdirt called the discontinuation of Google Reader "one of the defining moments in the shift from a more distributed, independent web to one that is controlled by a few large companies."
From Wikipedia’s article on Google Reader, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4