You may have read that Bloglines is being shutdown, but that doesn’t exactly mean RSS readers are dead. Google Reader, for one, is still growing strong.
Google posted a couple of graphs today showing how use continues to grow from year to year.
"Since Reader’s fifth anniversary is also approaching (though it feels like yesterday, Reader was launched on October 7, 2005), we thought it might be a good time to reflect on how Reader has grown over the past few years. While we were busy redesigning (twice!), making friends with Buzz and iGoogle, translating, breaking up, gossiping and playing, more and more people picked up the Reader habit," writes Google’s Mihai Parparita.
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t let it be known just how many people are using Google, but there is clearly an upward trend. They do say that users are counted as someone who uses Reader once a week. That is depicted in this graph:
This graph shows number of items read per day:
It would appear that as more people use Reader, they are also reading more within Reader.
Regardless of the numbers, Google is aiming to pick up Bloglines’ leftovers. The company is encouraging users to import their Bloglines feeds into Google Reader.