Seems like the first complaint is actually an improvement in the new version. You lose the reading focused only culture, but you gain the ability to have even b

Seems like the first complaint is actually an improvement in the new version. You lose the reading focused only culture, but you gain the ability to have even better granularity. You can share stories with your sports buddies, work relevant info with your coworkers, local stuff with people in your area. Before, you were limited to a very niche group. Now, you can share with people who never even heard of Google Reader or RSS. And if you wanted, you could make an old Google Reader power readers circle. I think that is a fair trade off when you are talking about a Google scale application; I think this the main point everyone is missing, you aren't the typical user. If you were, Google Reader would be mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook. Divorcing the social aspect from the RSS reader makes sense. Social reading should be a subset of Google+, not a layer on top of Google Reader. Google should improve the reading articles aspect of Google+ (Sparks or whatever seemed DOA), yes, but the overarching concept is very sound.