The interesting thing to me is that Google is throwing away a human-powered recommendation engine; Google Reader was people putting together their own equivalen

The interesting thing to me is that Google is throwing away a human-powered recommendation engine; Google Reader was people putting together their own equivalent of something like dmoz.org, volunteering analytics on prioritization. Perhaps the organizing being done was too tech-focused to be of enough value in any other category, or Google is confident enough in algorithms to drop the parallel system. Or, as was stated, their wasn't enough participation at all.