Former Googler: Reader’s Death is All About Google Plus
Shelly Palmer
When Google announced it was killing Google Reader on July 1st, just one thought crossed my mind: “I bet this has something to do with Google+.” I didn’t have anything more than a hunch to go on, however, until Brian Shih, a former Google Reader product manager, confirmed my suspicions on Quora. Shih, who left Google in 2011, explains how the company’s insistence on building a social network (to counter Facebook of course) has resulted in the company’s engineers being coaxed away from the Reader group. This is because Reader team members, according to Shih, are believed to be the only ones at Google that truly understand social. After all, before Google Reader’s sharing features were converted to corresponding Google+ ones, users of the soon-to-be-killed service used to share like crazy. Shih postulates, with plenty of logic, that this activity dropped as Google pushed Reader users to sharing on Google+ instead.
