The Top Posts Widget and Google Reader Extension to be retired on April 1st

12Jan
Ilya Grigorik
by Ilya Grigorik
Tags

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Since PostRank joined the Google family, our combined teams have been hard at work on some exciting new projects. As our focus shifts to making these available to you, it’s time for us to retire others.

To make sure this is a smooth transition and to ensure that your site is not affected, we’re sharing the timelines below for the closing of the Top Posts widget and the Google Reader extension (for all browsers).

  • The Top Posts widget and WordPress plugin installs will continue to work as usual until April 1st. At that time the Top Posts widgets and the PostRank APIs will be disabled. Please remove the Top Posts widget javascript code from your site before April 1st, and note that after this time the widget will not display any data.
  • Similarly, the Google Reader extension will continue to operate until April 1st. If you are a current user, you can safely remove the browser extension any time before April 1st.

Finally, as of today you will no longer be able to install new Top Posts widgets or Google Reader extensions. This is for new installations only. As mentioned, existing installations will work until April 1st.

We hope you found these services valuable. If you have any questions about the retirement of these services please direct them to support@postrank.com.

From Announcement, Extensions

  • Wout van den Dool

    And…… What about the alternatives?

  • http://kikolani.com/ Kristi Hines

    I’m not a fan of Google acquiring PostRank. :(  I love the Google Reader extension and have written about it in tons of posts and my own eBook as being an extremely valuable tool. 

  • http://twitter.com/ninetales999 九尾

    What a pity! I was looking forward to re-support firefox :-(

  • Anonymous

    Google has no plans to develop similar tools, so any alternatives would be third party and I’m afraid I don’t really know what the landscape looks like for tools like that at present.

  • http://twitter.com/seonate Nate Dame

    This is a huge bummer. Postrank for Google Reader has been an invaluable tool for my business. Not even a paid service in the future? Nothing?

    I’m sure Google will figure out something cool to do with Postrank, but this is a huge loss :(

    What alternatives would you recommend?

  • Anonymous

    About the closest thing I know of is the existing “sort by magic” function within Google Reader. Beyond that, not much out there that I’m aware of.

  • HB

    Why would they take away such a cool feature?

  • http://twitter.com/seonate Nate Dame

    Thanks. So tell us something… are we going to see anything like Postrank come stats come public again, or is this all going into internal algorhythms and back-end analytics?

  • http://blog.jordankeats.com/ jordankeats

    Truly a sad day. There was no better way to find the signal in the noise than PR and GR. Thanks for providing this free service for so many years. One can only hope one of your “exciting new projects” is the exact same feature under the Google brand. And, “sort by magic” is not even close to an alternative.

    Alternatives:
    summify.com
    feedly.com
    scoop.it

  • http://notatnik.mekk.waw.pl Mekk

    Pity. Top Posts Widget was not perfect, but was the best try to solve an important problem.

    Once more Google canibalizes interesting service.

  • http://www.tourist-destinations.com/ Tourist

    Such a shame. It was the best way of providing Top post to a website.

  • http://twitter.com/simon_alexander simon_alexander

    this is really annoying – I just removed the plug in to check for bug issues in Chrome and can’t get it back now – cannot see it anywhere to download?

  • Heather

    You can’t download it anymore. :(

  • http://www.vexite.com Marck

    I wish this is just one of those advance April Fools’ day prank. I don’t know…

  • http://cheap-tutorial.blogspot.com/ Blogspot Tutorial

    thanks brother.i think what you say is right :)

  • http://www.krispijnbeek.nl Krispijn Beek

    A pitty to see Postrank’ top post widget and google reader extension fade away. Will be looking for alternatives as the ‘sort by magic’ function of google reader misses the flexibility of postrank’s google reader externsion. Also the top post widget will be missed.

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