Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything. While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.-  Marco Arment, Marco.org

 More than anything, I think Marco’s assessment of RSS and its relationship with RSS is spot on and suggest you read the article. Like most I switched to Feed.ly, and I’m not exactly enamored with it but they are doing their part with an API,

The walled garden isn’t completely finished, not by a long shot but we’re slowly easing away from the commons we once all shared.