There's been an announcement from Google that they are finally implementing one the most-asked for features for Google Reader: sharing items from Readers to your G+ circles. Once implemented, sharing news items from Reader to other Reader users no longer makes sense.
Google ditching Reader API makes more sense as a possibility than Google ditching Reader all-together.
I voiced some of my concerns in the other HN submission which I will repeat here:
The old system had flaws but it worked. Firstly, I'm not against G+ integration if it meant both products were improved. However, this change looks to me like forcing a whole lot of Reader users to begrudgingly use G+. Reader's social features were not improved; only removed other than a "share to G+".
Not replacing the following system with an interface into G+ so that you can view and comment on friends' submissions from Reader is annoying. Reader was my social network. Why are they forcing me to go open G+ in a new tab everyday to see if my friends had shared anything? That's the _very_ reason I use a feed aggregator. Google doesn't provide any way to view streams in Reader (to my knowledge. I would really love to be wrong here); the only way is probably to use a third party method with no guarantee to not break every time Google touches the G+ code.
Edit: additionally, when viewing shared items on Reader, Reader tries to get the article or picture in. Now, not only do you have to go to G+, it only gives you a link rather than try to fit the article or picture onto the post. Irritating.
I guess a big thing that I have to wonder here is how many folks stopped using Reader (or became less engaged) after they swapped many of the built in sharing features out for G+ integration...
Many of the people in my social circle that were big Google Reader users stopped using it because it was much more difficult to share articles that we'd browse while at work.
Ironically, google reader was discontinued because they wanted people to use g+ exclusively for "sharing", and reader's ability to share/surface articles to friends was seen as unnecessary competition.
I don't expect any of the core features of google reader to change. Why would they?
Sure, sharing and friends will be replaced by Google+ variants, but to me that sounds like a good thing. Instead of copying articles and pasting them into Google+, I'll be able to just hit share.
I was pretty excited about Google moving sharing to Google+ as I like Google+ and I think making it easy to share will be crucial to success.
That being said, I hate the new Google Reader. I used it primarily as sharing tool, and the new sharing makes that more difficult. I think two fixes would make this better:
1) Being able to share easily with different circles. While I might be okay sharing publicly something interesting, there are plenty of less-than-appropriate funny articles that I only want to share with a few friends. This is one of the strengths of Google+, and it'd be great if Reader could take advantage of this.
2) Being able to see shared articles from other people. I understand they want to increase traffic to Google+, but this was always a great feature of Reader. In effect, each friend that used reader became their own feed. It'd be great to still have this feature and even though you're decreasing traffic to plus.google.com, you'd be increasing the overall use of Google+
After all, before Google Reader’s sharing features were converted to corresponding Google+ ones, users of the soon-to-be-killed service used to share like crazy. Shih postulates, with plenty of logic, that this activity dropped as Google pushed Reader users to sharing on Google+ instead.
It's a nice feature but I doubt it'll get used much. For sharing to happen you need to first create a space where people enjoy hanging out with their friends, and that's not really what Google Reader is.
I meant to say that I never used Google Reader's sharing mechanisms.
Those features of Google Reader (friends, sharing) were useless dupes of other features present elsewhere on other websites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter). I already have enough friend lists to maintain as is.
I used Google Reader for reading, and that is it. I don't care that they integrate it with Google+, although to me it makes sense. I just care that they remove the useless separate list and ecosystem.
Reader used to be a fantastic way to share great content with your friends. When the sharing was replaced with +1 it indicated the Google wanted the sharing to happen on Google+ [1]. Which means content creators have to get on G+ to syndicate, despite every CMS having RSS output already.
One vote against. I love Google Reader. I have intelligent friends that share actively on it. I don't use Google Plus. I don't know if those friends use Google Plus. Now, I won't read the articles that my friends are sharing. I also expect sharing will go down as Google forcibly alters user behavior and manages an adoption problem.
In effect, Google is now impeding my access to great information. That's counter to their mission, isn't it? And it's risky to do this to a very loyal user group. Google Reader users are passionate about this product.
I use Reader a lot, but as a curated reading list, which was after all its primary function. Most people I know use it the same way. When Google+ launched, one of the most requested features I saw among my circles was integration to Reader. Now, it seems they are incorporating these changes, and removing the social features in Reader as redundant, and that seems perfectly logical to me.
Okay, some users did make extensive use of these features. But in all the time Reader has been around, you'd have been laughed off if you tried to pass it off as a social network, let alone the best one.
Its not like the "reader" features are being retired. And it's not like Google hasn't been on a spring-cleaning spree lately, shuttering numerous other products.
So I really don't understand why this action cannot be taken at face value. If, like the author suspects, Google is looking to boost membership of Google+ by killing off Buzz and Reader communities, I think they have bigger problems. I doubt anyone would notice if the entire active Buzz and Reader communities joined Google+ en masse.
On the contrary, Google Reader has barely any G+ in it. The major complaint of the redesign is that it stripped Reader of its social features without replacing it with anything. If G+ integration existed which provided the same use cases, people would be happy with it.
It's been quite a while since I've used Google Reader since my reliance on RSS in general has decreased over the last couple years. However, for anyone who still uses Reader on a regular basis who might be able to comment on this, I think Yonatan might be missing the point. It seems he's looking to incorporate individual features/aspects of Reader into G+ in order to woo newly disenfranchised users back into the Google ecosystem. The problem is that I think this is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Even if he incorporated a large subset of Reader features into G+, I think at best that would likely only capture the wants of a small fraction of the Reader user base given that both products have inherently different goals. G+ is, depending on how you look at it, either a full-fledged social network or a central identity service connecting various components of the Google ecosystem. Reader is a dedicated, decentralized (in the sense that the feeds themselves come from outside Google) RSS consumer. Both products seemingly have different philosophical approaches to the web (walled-garden vs. generally open) and I'm not sure that can be reconciled so easily.
These musings are off the top of my head though, so I'd love to hear thoughts from any avid Reader users and/or G+ engineers/users who agree/disagree.
It's worse than that. The google plus era redesign of all google sites ate up a massive fraction of the vertical space in Google Reader. And some social sharing features that made google reader an awesome place, were disabled in favor of sharing via google plus.
About Google Reader:.
"Google announced they were discontinuing Google Reader, stating the product had a loyal but declining following, and they wanted to focus on fewer products".
I cannot believe it's true. My understanding is with a news aggregator like it Google cannot control the news feed like it does with Google news.
The title here is misleading. The guy is asking if the unofficial google reader API is being retired, not if google reader is being retired. (Google reader is getting an overhaul to fit googles new design and some of the social bits are being moved to google+)
Google ditching Reader API makes more sense as a possibility than Google ditching Reader all-together.
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