Google Reader Gets A Redesign, Dumps Social Features

Today Google is announcing a new design for Google Reader. As part of the redesign, Google is axing all of Reader’s social features. No more friending, no more following and no more sharing.

Google is telling users to transition over to Google+ if they want to continue using social features as part of their daily news consumption. This is inline with the general direction of where RSS is headed. RSS serves as a bloodline to many of the world’s most popular websites, but nowadays people prefer to consume news on their favorite social networking site. Google hopes that users of Google Reader will transition over to Google+, and not Twitter or Facebook. 

To appease disgruntled users, Google is announcing a new feature which exports all of the data that will soon be deleted. This includes Subscriptions, Shared Items, Friends, Likes and Starred Items. For more information, check out the official Google blog.