As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes. There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so what am I missing here?
Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything. Now they get rid of things left and right. It was basically the beginning of the end.
Web Accelerator, Wave, Google Video immediately spring to mind, but there's a few dozen smaller services that were all cancelled before Reader was.