Earlier this month, the rumor mill was abuzz with speculation that Facebook was designing a new RSS-reading service to replace the discontinued Google Reader (which will cease operation next Monday). After all, Google’s app was a relatively popular one, and while the company maintained that RSS feeds were losing steam, the shuttering of Google Reader was still going to displace a lot of users. The June 20 press event that was supposedly meant for the unveiling of Facebook’s RSS reader ended up being a reveal for the new Instagram video feature, but according to reports published on Tuesday, all of that early speculation may not have been terribly far off.

It turns out that Facebook actually is launching “a news-reading interface,” though the new application evidently won’t be based on RSS as initially speculated. Very little is known about the new service, but an insider source did reveal that it has been in development for quite some time. Other sources, meanwhile, speculate that the reader could bear a model similar to that of Flipboard, a social-media aggregation app for Android that collects different social network feeds (as well as feeds from other websites) and presents them in a magazine format as a personalized news feed.

But what of the RSS reader? Who will replace Google’s dying application if not Facebook?

Those two questions were also answered on Tuesday, as AOL announced their own, brand-new RSS application.The service, predictably titled “AOL Reader,” is currently in a private sign-in only beta phase, but the website is up, and prospective users can link their Twitter or Facebook profile with the service to set up a future account.

As far as timing is concerned, there’s little doubt as to why AOL has chosen now to enter the RSS game now. The company’s new RSS reader will open to the public on Monday, July 1, just as Google makes their dramatic exit. Furthermore, the basic outline of features on the current AOL Reader beta site even makes explicit mention of the late Google reader, encouraging users to “sign in with [their] Google account to automattically [sic]  import [their] subscriptions from Google Reader.” But even if the service is built to cash in on a very obvious circumstance, displaced Google Reader users will likely be glad to have somewhere new to take refuge.

The beta page also reveals a few other bare-bones features of the new reader, from its customizable capabilities (the new service will allow users to view subscriptions in a variety of different layouts, including a traditional list of headlines and an “infinitely-scrolling” news ticker) to an organization system that will allow readers to star and save their favorite articles or tag others for later use.