Google finally unveiled their facelift for Reader. Before today, quite a few people have been up in arms about Google's decision to kill the "sharing" and "following" functions. I barely used those features, but it struck me as really odd to kill features that have very loyal fans (including Iranian revolutionaries) and cost nothing to maintain.
Reader is not a product for casual users. It's a powerful tool for keeping track of of literally thousands of articles and posts from many, many sources. It lets you make snap decisions about what to read, what to skim, and what to skip without navigating away from the Reader page. If you polled a thousand users about interface updates, I don't you'd get too many responses begging for way less information per square inch of screen real estate. But that's exactly what they did.
I get that Google+ is not the smash hit they'd hoped for, and I understand their plan to nudge more people into the service. But how many times does Google get to take a hatchet to successful products with loyal fans before they lose their golden status?
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| It's like they decided to double-space everything. |
