With a shocking statement issued on July 30th, 2009, NewsGator has discontinued one of the most successful online RSS readers. The company has informed all customers that it has published a set of instructions on how to migrate their user feeds to Google Reader accounts. The free service is one of the oldest around, being considered one of the pioneers in the RSS market.

NewsGator Online will officially go offline on August 31st 2009, up to which moment all users are expected to migrate their feeds to another online RSS reader. On a surprising note, NewsGator has announced that, due to the latest feedback the company has been getting from its customers, a partnership with Google Reader was set in place to help users get the best service available online for RSS reading.

J.B. Holston, president and CEO, had the following to say about the Google collaboration: “We looked for the best online reader companion, and online synchronization platform option, for our consumer applications … and of course have had tons of requests for synch with Google as well. Google was clearly the best option for an online companion to the consumer readers we’ll continue to innovate and support.”

On the subject of stopping NewsGator Online and other free services provided by his company, J.B. Holston added the following: “We have a pretty limited audience for the consumer apps that we’re not going to continue to support, including Online. We felt that as we add Google Reader synch for our best-of-breed consumer apps we would take the opportunity to focus our portfolio and activities where we have big audiences.”

This last statement was a direct result of the official one made by NewsGator on the previous day (July 29th, 2009), in which it had announced that it would continue to develop and concentrate its efforts on enterprise software, an area in which it had gained more than one million customers in the last 18 months.

The discontinuing of NewsGator Online came as a natural follow-up to the direction the company announced it would take in the future, concentrating more efforts on enterprise products and paying customers.

Instructions on how to migrate from NewsGator Online and sync user feeds with Google Reader can be found here. Several other free products that will be discontinued are on the same list.