14 DAY TRIAL // Google Reader is the world's most popular RSS/Atom feed reader, which isn't actually saying much since the protocol never became a hit with the mainstream audience.
However, it can do more than just feeds, one rather obscure feature enables you to follow the changes to any web page on the web, even if it doesn't have a feed set up.
If you didn't known about this feature, it's too late to start using it now, Google will be discontinuing it starting next week.
"As of September 30th, we’ll be turning off track changes in Reader. While this isn’t a widely used feature, we wanted to let you know in advance so you can set up a suitable alternative (such as http://page2rss.com)," Google Reader's Brian Shih, announced.
"Your previous updates will not go away, but you will stop receiving new updates from any custom feeds you have set up," he said
"We apologize for any inconvenience this causes -- and as always, please feel free to visit our help forum if you have any questions," he added.
Google introduced the feature earlier this year. The premise is simple, add any URL and Google Reader will create a feed for it. This way, you could track the changes to any public page online, like policy pages or the Google homepage.
When a change was detected, courtesy of Google's indexing engine, it showed up as an update in Reader. In theory, this should come in handy, though the feature proved hit-and-miss in practice.
Google didn't do much to promote the feature, maybe because it didn't invest too much in it, maybe because it just didn't work right.
But the result was the same, not a lot of people used it. And they won't get the chance to either, the feature is getting the axe next week. Google could have just left it there, but there's probably a reason why it needs to discontinue it.