.:aaron.helton:.
musings.of {'husband', 'father', 'technologist', 'international civil servant', 'humanist', 'skeptic', 'gamer', 'dreamer'}

I am what you might call a Google Reader power user. In the graphic below (Figure 1), you can see what Google says I’ve been up to for the last two years, which is about how long I’ve been using the service. I will let the stats stand for themselves, because I am not here to talk about the stats. Suffice it to say I originally came to Google Reader (leaving behind Netvibes) because of its ability to manage large amounts of news and Web happenings (of which I am a voracious consumer). I kept coming back for the social aspects, the idea that I could jump into conversations with people I may or may not have met in real life about the articles we had in common. To top it off, I actually made a friend, IRL, that I met on Google Reader.

Figure 1: Google Reader Stats

When Google announced over a week ago that Google Reader was getting an update, I greeted the news with a mixture of excitement and dread. On the one hand, we were finally going to get Google+ integration (which, as you might recall, I suggested was a natural next step), as well as a thematic change to match the ongoing redesign of the other Google properties. On the other hand, I was worried that removing the social options was premature, and that Google+ wasn’t really a suitable replacement. It is social enough, but it’s possibly too social to handle the load I was throwing at Google Reader.

Now that the new version is out, Google has validated my dread, and I’ve now lost one important aspect of my social life. Annoying as that is, there are other issues. Google has finally found a way to frustrate me with a design change. Following is a rundown of my own tests, the kind that matter to me, because they formed some part of my daily workflow. If you use or used Reader, but in different ways, I am interested in hearing how this change impacts you.

Test 1: Sharing from the Desktop version.

In the previous version of Google Reader, sharing was a single click, but only shared to a stream within Google Reader itself. I rarely used any of the Send To possibilities, but assumed that Google would have added Google+ there much sooner. It’s not there now, but no matter. A related action was the Like action. My usage indicates a preference for using both at the same time, but I always did have a hang-up about the Like verb. It was hard for me to Like a story that reported something bad, for instance, so I didn’t always use it, even if I shared it.

Figure 2: Plus 1 Hover

In the new version, Like and Share have been replaced by a +1 button. Hovering over the +1 button reveals what will happen if you click it (Figure 2). When you click the button in the Desktop version, Google acknowledges that you have publicly +1’d the item (Figure 3) and then gives you the option of sharing to Google+ (Figure 4).

Figure 3: Plus 1 Clicked

Figure 4: Shared to Google+

I am able to see all of my +1’s on the Desktop version of my Google profile: https://plus.google.com/u/0/102013352492248128705/plusones

My shares all show up in my Google+ stream. Item visibility will vary according to which Circles I’ve chosen to share to, but since I post a great deal publicly, many of them will be visible to anyone reading this.

Result: Nominal pass. When I suggested back in July that I wanted better sharing options for Google Reader, this is exactly what I had in mind. However, this does ignore something. On any given day, I might have Shared some 50 items out of all the noise I encountered on Google Reader in a day. Most of those articles I actually read or at least skimmed. Some I shared for the headline alone, but the fact remains that I generated my own semblance of order from chaos, curating for those who were interested (all 37 of them) a pick of articles showcasing my technical expertise, my artistic sensibilities, my sense of humor, my political leanings, and my wont for the bizarre and otherwise entertaining or interesting. To date, only a VERY limited subset of those items ever made it to Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, meaning that by the time they reach those networks, I’ve already performed double curation. What this change means is that I now have one less level of filtration, which has two possible effects: 1) more of the first level stuff gets shared to Google+, potentially inundating my friends and followers there with items of middling quality, or 2) (most likely) I still perform double curation, but those items of middling quality that might nevertheless have been interesting to discuss will be shuffled off to an invisible (i.e., non-actionable) backwater.

Test 2: Discovering interesting people based on mutual Likes/Shares.

One of the benefits of the old system was that you could see who else had clicked the Like action in Reader. My feed subscriptions range from highly trafficked (lots of followers and, consequently, lots of Likes per post) to completely unknown (I’m the only follower). Assuming a normal distribution, most of them would have had manageable numbers of Likes to view, meaning I could have figured out pretty easily who else liked some really obscure site (which I suspect is how I got some of the followers I picked up over time.) Since the new Reader interface has done away with those, we are left with trying to decipher the +1’s of a post. The best I can see is the number, which you can see in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Public Plus 1's

Result: Fail. I just can’t see who else has publicly liked the same article, much less shared it. If anyone can figure this out, please leave a comment.

Test 3: Sharing from the mobile browser inferface.

This I have to do in mobile Safari on my iPad or iPhone. I don’t have an Android device to test out the native app version of Reader (there isn’t one for iOS yet), so this will have to suffice. And anyway, this is one of the important ways I consume news.

Figure 6: Mobile Browser Sharing

In Figure 6, you can see a story in the mobile view of Reader. Note the options include no Send To action, but the +1 button is there.

Figure 7: Plus 1 Click

When you click the +1 button, Reader indicates that the item has been publicly +1’d, but no other options for sharing appear (Figure 7).

At present, there are no viable sharing options from the iPad, at least none that I am aware of. My external applications, Instapaper and Flipboard, are incapable of sharing to Google+, and copy/paste results in a completely textual URL in the mobile browser version of Google+ (no summary, no images, but the link is clickable at least).

Result: Fail. Thanks, Google, for crippling one of my devices for me.

By now, I think you get the picture. I’m frustrated with the way Reader works now, and I can’t imagine it being nearly as engaging now that the social features are gone. For what it’s worth, I like Google+ and was hoping for good integration with Google Reader, but I came to depend on the social features more than I thought I had, and they just aren’t the same in Google+.

So I think I’m in the market for a new social news reader that’s capable of pulling together hundreds of feeds with thousands of items per month and letting people converse around those news items. Any viable takers?