If you became a heavy user of the Internet within the past decade, you may only know of Google Reader through those reminiscing about the tools of long ago and far away. Perhaps you have also heard the product mentioned by those complaining about the useful services Google decided to kill even though many seemed to have found them useful.
The Verge just published a great piece summarizing the history of Reader and that can be used by anyone wanted to catch up on the history of online tech. As even my more recent posts have indicated, I still find value in RSS and “readers” that allow a user control of the content they access. Source awareness and context are what we lose when we become enamored of AI summaries of questionable validity.