iAlja's Online Hub

… or perhaps they do, but they decided it was worth less than the potential dozen or so new Google+ users. Yes, I get it. Google Reader is a niche product. The sharing/following functionality Google decided to kill to force us to use +1 buttons was probably only used by a small minority of geeks. 

But I’m one of the geeks, and sharing/following was what made Google Reader my favorite Google product (beside search). And a product I’d be willing to pay for. 

Alas, starting today, Google Reader has turned into just a reader. A not particularly readable reader for RSS feeds, one of many. The gray and whitespace overdose perhaps even makes it a worse reader than many sexy ones we’re seeing on the iPad.

And no, sharing on Google+/Facebook/Twitter is not really an alternative to what we had. The dynamics of RSS reading is different from interacting with friends on social networks, where the emphasis is on serendipitous discovery and real time news. Usually, I check Google Reader about twice a day, and I used to mark several items in quick succession as interesting (the magic Share button that would share items with my followers), but out of those I’d only post one or even none to Facebook or Twitter to avoid news feed spam.

So basically, Google just killed a unique functionality that Google Reader provided without offering a real alternative. I honestly don’t think that will provide a significant increase in Google+ usage; the geeks using sharing/following on Google Reader aren’t really the ones Google has to convince to start using Google+. If anything, Google has just made me even more anti-Google+ with its aggressive push throughout their services. I guess that’s what you get for the price of free.

And I’m really, really hoping that a good sharing/following alternative for RSS feeds will soon show up! Any suggestions?