A griping post.
The worst thing that happened last year was the Iron Curtain that fell over Google Reader - when it came to life all of a sudden, I had great hopes for it. It promised a personalised web: in the first week, search results showed up pages from people I were following, and pages I had bookmarked on Delicious, and from the subscribed tags on Delicious. It was brilliant : when you google, say, Brecht, you might get study notes and stuff on the first page of its results- but not on Reader. Reader gave you results that mattered to you.
You use the web for these three things : find, keep and share stuff. Facebook and Twitter are great for sharing stuff, and indirectly finding stuff. But there is no way for you to keep those stuff if you don't do something about it. Try searching Twitter or Facebook for something you noticed a couple of weeks bacjk.
All Google had to do was make it easy to subscribe to the RSS of any particular public page, and create a more easier user interface for sharing stuff from Reader. I used pull in stuff from Twitter and Facebook for safekeeping, sure that I could retrieve them as and when I wanted to do. All that was not to be.
Google Plus is trying to do something that Facebook and Twitter are doing extraordinarily well. But with Google Reader with its superior search engine, they could have given us a personalised web. Google's failure to see this is painful, to say the least.
