My love for Google Reader — may it rest in peace — will never die, so when The Verge comes out with a 4,000-word piece on its creation, flourishing, and untimely demise, I must link to it.

Google killed Reader before it had the chance to reach its full potential. But the folks who built it saw what it could be and still think it’s what the world needs. It was never just an RSS reader. “If they had invested in it,” says Bilotta, “if they had taken all those millions of dollars they used to build Google Plus and threw them into Reader, I think things would be quite different right now.”

Pour one out…