Google Reader. Born 2005. Died July 1, 2013. Survived by Feedly, Inoreader, and a mass of RSS feeds that slowly went dark because nobody was reading them anymore. Google Reader did one thing: it showed you new posts from sites you chose, in the order they were published. It had no algorithm, no recommendations, no engagement metrics. You subscribed to feeds. You read them. You marked them as read. That was it. Its death was not caused by lack of users — it had millions — but by a lack of strategic fit. Google wanted social. Reader users wanted to be left alone with their reading. These goals were incompatible. In the 12 years since, we have not built a better product for reading the open web in chronological order. We have built many worse ones.