Google is cancelling its popular RSS reader effective today despite protests from users.
RSS readers allow people to get updates from their favorite blogs and websites all in one place.
Google launched Google Reader in 2005 but decided to shut it down effective today because the meeting legal regulations was simply too expensive.
"In Europe they've had a regulation for years where basically, if someone requests that all their data on a site be deleted, the company must comply. Reader wasn't compliant with that. So it comes down to, do you spend a lot more resources making the service compliant, or working on something new?" a company spokesman told Foxnews.com.
European lawsuits have been another problem.
Newspapers in Belgium and France sued Google in 2006 for showing previews of their news articles in search results. Google paid the newspaper’s legal fees after all parties reached a settlement in 2012.
Google has non-regulatory reasons for shutting the service down as well. The cost of maintaining all of the servers necessary to run the program is expensive. Google also needs lots of programmers to write the code that makes it all work and fix the occasional problem.
Justifying the costs associated with running the service is difficult when fewer people are using the service.
“There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience,” Google said on The Official Google Reader Blog .
Google Reader users can use Google Takeout to back up their data onto their personal computers.