Google Reader, which was released to the public as a Google Labs project on Oct. 7, 2005, and was suppossed to be a solution for the Web’s rapidly growing problem of content overload will shut down on July 13th.

“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites,” the company said. “While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.”

Google Reader lets users subscribe to and read feeds from all manner of publishers, in a format that resembles an e-mail in-box..”

Google has acknowledged that some of the Reader’s core social functionality was being replicated and even replaced within Google+, and that it was pushing Reader users in that direction, including the decision to cut out sharing options from Reader completely.

“Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall,” wrote Alan Green, a Google software engineer, in Google’s last official Reader blog post in late 2011. “We hope you’ll like the new Reader (and Google+) as much as we do, but we understand that some of you may not.

CNET.com editors have suggested five alternatives to Reader for you once it shuts down