[delroth]

Google Reader was the last major user of the old social sharing stack at Google designed for Buzz, a product mostly remembered to these days for United States v. Google and the 2011 FTC consent decree. When people redesigned Google's social stack for G+ (e.g. all the infrastructure like Zanzibar underlying Circles, which to this day is close to state of the art!) the choice was between migrating Reader to the new tech - which nobody could justify the cost of - or keeping the old tech around for Reader when that tech was known to have had serious privacy issues leading to a major lawsuit.