Chief Architect of Google+ requests clarification on Google Reader

Yeah, this is not the organization that should be acting as de-facto curators of the Internet, I'm thinking. What's being described here isn't a cathedral or a bazaar, but a bureaucracy.

Differently, Reader does not seem like the kind of app that would inspire a lot of uniquely hard engineering problems. (I.e., any hard engineering problems would probably be shared by several other Google services.) That seems to suggest that far fewer engineers would be attracted to working on it exclusively, and any that did wouldn't have any significant investment in Reader as a product.

There are valid reasons to discontinue even a mature product with a reasonable amount of success, populist or monetary. I dislike that Google declined to share those (though I sympathize with the managing principle of "just do it; don't explain why"), but I doubt I'd run any company the way Google is run in the first place, so my opinion on that front isn't really useful.

I've tried to explain how powerful it is, how it centrally gathers so many diverse publications, how it gives a new perspective on global events or political sensitive topics.

But it's a blank screen, the welcome wizard is helpful (I started with Apple and Google collections and quickly added Planet Gnome and Mozilla), but it's not the same.

Google+ is a product that tries to do everything, but makes the simplest things difficult. After Buzz, Google made discovery impossible, so G+ users accumulate very slowly. I'd like to "subscribe" to a circle, say Linux kernel or Node.js developers, but instead I have to get linked to someones G+ from somewhere like here and then follow just that user. I should be able to subscribe to that entire circle with one click, and have it appear as a subgroup on the left sidebar, and the, Presto, we have 50% of Google Reader.

I would suggest Reader be replaced (if it must) with G+ Curator, a reader for feeds including RSS and Atom, but also G+ Circles, third party feeds like Twitter or Tumbler (if possible), mayabe Google Groups or even a gmail filter.

I would use the Reader API for this, it's basically an atom feed aggregator, and could convert all those other inputs into Atom feeds the same as it does Atom and RSS today. I would translate the current feed IDs into G+ ids.

The problem with Google dropping RSS is it basically kills the prospect of sites bothering with RSS, they look to Tumblr and the like and think there's something there, but they find they can't easily browse other feeds, and it becomes like Facebook (now), a mess of pithy sayings and 'viral' photographs that people probably don't bother to read. Then, at some point Tumblr (or some other site) shuts down and the community goes with it, the orgranization is lost and the users find something else to waste their time on.

But really, unless Google looks at fixing problems with G+ and makes it something that people want to use, we'll be not talking about it's shutdown a year or two from now