My offer to Google Reader
Like many others, I was curious when Google announced that it would be revamping the Google Reader UI and refactor its social components into Google Plus. To that end, I wrote a brief blog post about what I felt would be a better alternative to stripping out Google Reader's social functionality.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Reader's social layer has been an awkward fit inside Google for years: back in January 2008, critics were already asking why the 'Shared Stuff' feature was getting no love in the company's broader social push (Shared Stuff's neglect), and by February 2010 Reader was experimenting with opening its sharing firehose more widely. On October 20, 2011, Google announced the endgame — a new look plus refactoring Reader's social components into Google Plus — and rolled the fresh design and Google+ sharing out to all users on October 31.
Fox's post, published two days after that rollout, is one voice in the resulting user pushback: rather than simply objecting to the removal of in-Reader sharing and commenting, it lays out what the author argues would be a better alternative to stripping the social functionality out entirely. Its significance is less the specific proposal than what it documents — a committed power user treating Reader's social graph as worth fighting for at the exact moment Google is dissolving it.
First-order effects
- Users who built their reading habits around Reader's native sharing, comments, and followed people lose those features with the October 31 redesign, with their social activity redirected into Google Plus streams instead.
- Fox's alternative hands Google a concrete counter-proposal at the moment of maximum user friction, giving the Reader team a documented case for preserving in-product sharing alongside the Google+ integration.
Second-order effects
- Rival feed readers can court the displaced sharers directly, competing on exactly the social-within-the-reader experience Google just removed.
- Google's bet is that folding sharing into Google Plus concentrates engagement and identity data in one place, strengthening the network against Facebook at the cost of goodwill in a smaller but vocal product community.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standalone product-level social features across Google's portfolio give way to a single company-owned social graph, turning apps like Reader into pure consumption surfaces whose communities exist only at the platform level.
The trend: Large consumer web platforms are consolidating per-product social features into one network-wide social graph, trading individual product communities for cross-service identity lock-in.