Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google+ features, and some clean-up
In the next week, we'll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we're going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google's other products) that we hope you love.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Reader has been quiet on the feature front since its 2009 burst of feed-reader additions, and this announcement marks its return to active development — but on Google's terms rather than the product's own. The redesign follows the company-wide visual overhaul laid out in June's Evolving the Google design and experience post, which committed Google to a consistent look across Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Reader.
The strategic driver is Google+: after years of failed social efforts, Google is threading its network through existing properties, as it already signaled with July's round of Google+ changes. The catch, flagged by syndicated coverage at SiliconFilter, is that Reader's own social features are being removed to make room — a direct trade of an established community layer for the newer one.
First-order effects
- Reader's existing users lose the product's native friend-sharing and commenting features within the week, forced onto Google+ circles if they want to keep sharing what they read.
- Google gains a high-engagement distribution surface for Google+: Reader's audience of habitual daily users becomes another funnel into the social network.
Second-order effects
- Power users who relied on Reader's social graph become prospective customers for rival RSS readers and third-party front-ends, handing competitors a recruiting moment.
- Other Google product teams face the same template: any standalone feature that overlaps with Google+ is now a candidate for removal, setting expectations for how Gmail, Docs, and others will be 'integrated' next.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's portfolio consolidates around a single mandatory social layer, and niche products survive only insofar as they serve Google+ growth — raising the perceived risk of investing in any Google product whose metrics don't advance that goal.
- The move tests whether a company can migrate users off an organic community they built and onto a corporate one; failure here would push Google toward more aggressive consolidation, success toward repeating it everywhere.
The trend: Google is systematically dissolving per-product social features into the Google+ layer, making the 2011 redesign wave a vehicle for network-building rather than product improvement.