Marco’s blog post today stirred up a lot of feelings for me about Google Reader. The recent visual design changes around Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader haven’t bothered me too much. I don’t think the design is spectacular, but I can live with it. #

What bothers me more is the elimination of features in Google Reader that made it a useful tool for me to both consume information and publish thoughts about the items I was reading. It used to be that I could simply publish interesting posts I found in reader to a dedicated shared Reader feed. Now, Google would like me to use Google Plus instead. #

Now on the one hand, I don’t mind the shift to Google Plus. Plus is an interesting product, with some nifty features. And even though I haven’t used it much to this point, I can see how I might like it more than Twitter or Facebook for talking to a community. On the other hand, the new feature set for Reader makes it painful to incorporate Plus into my news reading workflow. #

Like Marco, I have been using Google Reader as my primary RSS reader for more than 2 years now. After trying out NetNewsWire and several other dedicated readers over the years, I finally came to the conclusion that none of them were as efficient for reading and sharing feeds as Google Reader’s own website on the desktop and on the iPad. RSS readers on the iPad are particularly problematic for me because I subscribe to so many feeds. Starting up an RSS reader on the iPad inevitably requires an interminable wait while the reader fetches the current state of my feeds. Using Google Reader’s iPad-enabled website is much more efficient because it only fetches the data that I need to see at the moment. #

One of the great things about using Google Reader was that it was easy to share items that I thought others might appreciate. On the desktop, I could simply tap shift-S to drop an article into my shared feed, and it was easy to add a note if I wanted to. On the iPad, these features were available to me at a tap. What I ended up with, then, was a lightning-quick way to keep a micro-blog of items that interested me. #

Now, with the Reader redesign, I’m supposed to share blog posts using Google Plus. To do that, I need to click on a non-obvious link at the top of the page. There is no keyboard shortcut available for sharing a blog post with Google Plus. Even worse, on the mobile site, there is no way to share a blog post either to Google Plus or a shared feed with or without a note. The concept of sharing from Google Reader on the iPad doesn’t exist any longer. #

So, what used to be a dead simple keyboard operation now requires copying, pasting, and switching applications (or at least browser tabs). Not to mention that I now have to figure out what stream to share this in. Twitter? Not a lot of room for context or commentary. Plus? Clunky and cluttered. My own blog? Not very efficient, but at least I own it. Delicious or Pinboard? The functionality and ease of posting is there, but that’s not really what those services are intended for. Tumblr? Possibly, but again it’s clunky to get the feeds from Google Reader. #

And I’m not even talking about what I might do on iPad. Other then e-mailing the blog post out of Google Reader, there’s not much that I can do that doesn’t involve a lot of switching apps and copying and pasting. (Perhaps I should give another look at Posterous; that service’s email interface might ease the pain of posting a bit.) #

I have been giving a lot of my online life over to Google over the past few years. Google was the first company to really deliver an information experience that weaved seamlessly from desktop to mobile device and back again. But redesigns like the one we’ve seen with Google Reader remind me that online workflows that depend on big companies and free products are fragile things. I don’t blame Google for doing what they think is right for their business, but I need to seriously reevaluate what parts of my online life are critical for me to manage, and which ones I’m willing to sacrifice when the service provider simply changes their mind about what they value. #

[Update: 11-14-11] Well blow me down. Looks like Google has added a G+ share button at the bottom of each post, where the old Google Reader share button used to be. Still nothing on the iPad mobile version of the site, as far as I can tell, but it’s a step in the right direction. #

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