New Delhi: Internet giant Google announced on Wednesday that it will officially shut down its popular RSS service, Google Reader, on July 1st, 2013 under a house cleaning campaign.

“These changes are never easy,” Google senior vice president of technical infrastructure Urs Holzle said in a blog post.

“But by focusing our efforts, we can concentrate on building great products that really help in their lives.”

Reader was launched in 2005 as a way for people to keep track of updates to favoured websites using RSS feeds, which have become passe on the Internet.

“While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined,” Holzle said in a blog post, noting that the Google Reader service will retire on July 1.

The company will also no longer provide support for the Google Voice app for BlackBerry users.