I have always been somewhat of a Google fanboy except for a few misgivings about their worrisome breadth of infiltration into people's live and things like the iGoogle shutdown but the Reader situation has been a huge slap in the face that made me lose a lot of faith in them.
There is a huge war between Facebook and Google for global control of the most popular social graph and as much as I like Zuckerberg as a person, I was rooting for G+ for its streamlined interface and perceived lesser level of evil. Now I'm not so sure.
I think there should be a third option in the form of a decentralized social protocol.
I think there is market for a "social rss" where you could choose amongst a number for providers, "Google Readers" for social if you will, that could connect to each other. That way people could choose their frontend and the way they consume their friends social feeds. This would open competition and give people choices of different user interfaces, layouts and themes.
For public posts the implementation could be fairly straightforward. I assume other providers would periodically fetch friends posts, upvotes, downvotes and other social interactions from other networks.
When it comes to private content, the providers would probably have to send things only to other trusted providers that promise to show it only to the correct "circles". However, I don't see it as a big deal since privacy in G+ and Facebook is already somewhat of an illusion because it only takes one amongst hundreds of friends to share your stuff outside the network. Maybe your friends would need to authenticate into your network and do email verification at least once. Maybe they could use a Mozilla Persona authentication?
There are companies that could do this without too much effort. Tumblr already publishes rss of their user's feed, they would only need to add the ability to consume rss and push for an upgrade of the rss protocol to support social features.
Digg has shown interest in doing an rss reader, why shouldn't they work on upgrading the protocol to include more social features?
What's especially frustrating is that for a while, it seemed like this was the direction Google might go; mash together google reader + gmail/contacts + (optionally) blogger and you have a pretty good open-web social network.
I made a simple command line tool for it, its api is simple enough. I can't say weather or not the over all design of the systems and protocols are good because that is not my area of expertise.
There is a huge war between Facebook and Google for global control of the most popular social graph and as much as I like Zuckerberg as a person, I was rooting for G+ for its streamlined interface and perceived lesser level of evil. Now I'm not so sure.
I think there should be a third option in the form of a decentralized social protocol.
I think there is market for a "social rss" where you could choose amongst a number for providers, "Google Readers" for social if you will, that could connect to each other. That way people could choose their frontend and the way they consume their friends social feeds. This would open competition and give people choices of different user interfaces, layouts and themes.
For public posts the implementation could be fairly straightforward. I assume other providers would periodically fetch friends posts, upvotes, downvotes and other social interactions from other networks.
When it comes to private content, the providers would probably have to send things only to other trusted providers that promise to show it only to the correct "circles". However, I don't see it as a big deal since privacy in G+ and Facebook is already somewhat of an illusion because it only takes one amongst hundreds of friends to share your stuff outside the network. Maybe your friends would need to authenticate into your network and do email verification at least once. Maybe they could use a Mozilla Persona authentication?
There are companies that could do this without too much effort. Tumblr already publishes rss of their user's feed, they would only need to add the ability to consume rss and push for an upgrade of the rss protocol to support social features.
Digg has shown interest in doing an rss reader, why shouldn't they work on upgrading the protocol to include more social features?
Other web based rss reader companies could do it.
A new team from this community.
Or even better, cooperation of all of the above!