Marco Arment:
Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.5 While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.
Bingo!
Nice work, Google. So, you shut down GReader in order to force me to use G+ and now instead of seeing the RSS feeds I’m reading, I moved to a different RSS reader entirely and now you see nothing. Dummies.
Pretty much.
Ditto here.
That makes me even happier that I deleted my Google+ account.
Yep they could have just dropped third party support and set it up so you have to use G+ to see your feeds.
It was rumoered to have only 500K subs.