Google Reader… Plus?

Google released their Google Reader revamp. Certainly prettier, though I’m not entirely convinced right now by the increased vertical space used by the list view.

Puzzling oversight is not importing my existing Reader friends into a Google Plus circle. Seems like a really obvious thing to do, and yet they’re giving everyone a chance to decide to jump platforms instead of following a painless migration path.

I suppose that Google is in a privacy bind here. Google Plus has that nice, easy option to post things that are visible to “your circles”… so creating a new circle means they’re exposing private information. But not creating a new circle means excluding existing relationships from their new network. Tricky.

Anyway, the rather painful migration path actually provided is:

  1. Go to the import/export page on Google Reader
  2. Export the “List of people that you follow”
  3. Read JSON enough to extract identifying characteristics and try to track these people down (importantly, it doesn’t include email addresses)

I rather doubt this will be widely employed.

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