[Jamiecon]

Normally I'm the person who makes this type of comment. I'm not a fan of resistance to change, or contrariness in general - especially the particularly annoying and overly dramatic Internet Blogger brands.

However for me the crucial missing feature is being able to view and comment on your friends' shared items within Reader.

I'm completely OK with Google requiring me to have a Google+ account, and see the sense in the merging of the two 'social networks'. I'm also fine with my shares appearing on Google+. I'm happy to configure a Circle to handle my shares.

But there's no way for me to read the items that my friends who are Google Reader users have shared _within_ Reader, as either individual or merged RSS feeds. This is something I used to be able to do, and now I can't - with no replacement.

That's why the backlash is justified in this case.

PS - Google you could make me happy just by having a 'Friends shared items' menu item which aggregates Google+ shares from Reader. That's all it would take.

I'll have fond memories of pressing 'Shift + S', C, and typing a message to a small group of mates for a while though. Those were the days!

[ImprovedSilence]

You, you just put my thoughts and frustrations into words, thank you. I'm also usually very open to change and what have you, but I despise the new reader. Exactly because I like to be in reader, and see what my friends posted from reader. I don't want it mixed with the rest of my social life, I don't want it mixed with FB like status updates, I just want to see what people are sharing in Reader. It's like I had my own "community" in reader, a small but special subset of people really in the "know". Yeahyeah, that's a circle, I know, but I went to reader to read what they shared, then I read my own, and shared. The 'dialog' was more circular, if that makes any sense. That, and my Reader slants heavily on the 'images' and artsy side of things, it was almost like a micro tumblr that only friends saw, but unlike tumblr, it's not recycled stuff, we are all pulling from different places, I followed a guy from finance, a dude that loved astronomy, and chick in advertising, a guy in tech, a girl into silly comics, and it was all right there, im my reader. It was perfect.

[gchucky]

I wish I could upvote you even more - this is _exactly_ my criticism with the new Reader. The experience of sharing links has essentially split into two parts: I can share items with my friends from Reader to G+, but if I want to see anything my friends have shared (or if they want to see my posts), we have to go to G+. It's not cohesive anymore.

If they just added a place where you could view other people's posts in Reader, that'd be perfect. Let it pull from a Circle or something and that's it.