Reid Dossinger

Sometime this week (supposedly), Google Reader is going to lose its social feature to Google Plus. This is a damn shame, since the People You Follow space has been, hands down, THE best social sharing tool I’ve ever used. In fairness, I think that Reader has been as great as it has been because the number of people I knew who used it was a pretty small group that was limited mostly to my closest friends who have a great deal of insight and share judiciously. But I also love Reader in that it’s extremely easy to share, easy to comment, and easy to control privacy, all on articles that you often don’t have to leave the interface to read in their entirety.

Some of my Reader friends have taken this news pretty hard, and that was my first impression (and really, second through sixth as well), but I’m kind of curious to see what the Plus integration will hold. It’s possible that, a month or two from now, we’ll be raving about how great Plus is for sharing articles from Reader. But while I hold a little bit of hope, my guess is that it’ll pale in comparison:

1. It’s most likely that sharing from Reader will now be much more like using the “Send to” feature, which is several extra steps, enough to lower the number of things people share.
2. Articles will just be shared in their snippet form, rather than being able to read the full article like you can now do on shares in Reader.
3. With Circles, people will no longer be able to request that you share your Reader articles with them. You have to decide who sees your articles up front, meaning you’ll be likely to miss some people who would be great to share with. It’s that huge flaw of Circles rearing its head again.

The one thing that really bugs me about this is that Google is making the huge mistake of trying to force Plus on people. There’s no reason that they couldn’t have kept the sharing functionality in Reader exactly the same way while also allowing your shared articles (and comments) to go over to Plus as well, the same way it used to work in Buzz, with the comments showing up in both places. This would have left the great Reader experience intact while also allowing a ton of new content to start flowing into Plus.

In other words, rather than focusing on making Plus the best product it can be, they’re pulling the plug on everything else so that it’s the only product there is. 

Google announced today that they’re going to be discontinuing Google Buzz. That probably won’t come as a surprise to most people, who’ll probably mostly be amazed that Buzz was still around, but for me, it’s actually kind of a disappointment. Buzz had become pretty useful for me, mostly as a better interface for commenting on Google Reader’s shared items.

The thing is, Buzz could have done a whole lot more. That exact same idea (Reader shares, Twitter and blog incorporation, status messages) could have been implemented in gmail AND been given a separate space. You could have opted out in gmail, but still used the standalone site to interact and share. Their one big misstep was automatically adding friends rather than letting you build those from the ground up. If they had been more patient with it and started with a simple on/off privacy mode rather than trying to force everyone to use it with frustrating privacy settings, I think it could have succeeded.

In short, everything they needed to create a good social media hub around Google was there. They just did it wrong, and they’re doing it wrong again with Plus. The difference is that Plus gets praised and Buzz gets hated, but there’s not much of a difference between the two. I wonder how many of these products Google will have to make before they get it right.

One of the things that most makes me feel like I’m beating my head against a wall is when I’m trying to convince people to click reaction buttons like the Facebook Like button or Google +1 button on web pages. I think that most people just don’t really think to do it when they read something that they like, but they should, because as Avinash Kaushik brilliantly termed it, it’s applause. 

Now, I kind of get why people shy away from the using the Facebook Like button: because it shows up on your Wall, has a chance to show up in people’s stream and now shows up in the ticker. All of those things are great for people trying to promote their content and get more clicks, but it’s not so great for those of us just trying to get feedback on what people are liking and if they’re actually reading what we’re writing. Even if you’re not actively embarrassed to have people know that you like it, it just feels a little more intrusive than a lot of people want to go through with. Even I’ve started shying away from clicking the Like button on content I like.The Google +1 is different, though. You should be clicking that business all the time. Here’s why:

It gives feedback. I know I already said this above, but this is huge. Just being able to click once and tell the author of the article with no uncertainty that you like the article is something you should always do. There’s only so much that we can tell from web analytics, and this is much more sure. This sort of feedback is like the currency of the web, and if you don’t spend it, it’s likely that your favorite outlets will go out of business.

It’s unobtrusive. Unlike the Facebook Like button, clicking the +1 button doesn’t immediately do anything, so it’s not widely and immediately broadcasting the click.

It’s helpful to your friends searching. This is where the “public” part of the +1 button comes in. In Google search results, the articles you’ve +1’d show that you recommend it just below the result. So while that means that you still shouldn’t +1 anything that you wouldn’t want people to know you’re reading, it can also be massively helpful. If you know that a friend of yours liked the fifth search result for an Excel formula rather than the first one, wouldn’t you want to know that? It’s a new, more helpful kind of sharing, and I think it’s been vastly underrated and under-advertised.

Get clicking.