What I'm losing with Google Reader

I'm going to keep this short. When I logged into Google Reader today I received the now somewhat familiar message from Google that they're shutting down a service. The first thing I did was jump to the internet (via Google search typically enough) to find out what the deal was. Why was Google shutting down Reader? The answer was typical. From Google's own Reader blog:

There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

The reasoning here is pretty straightforward and not terribly shocking given Google's general direction these days. Fewer products with tighter integration has been the general trend for some time now, and while this represents a continued move away from the experiment driven startup Google once was, we all know that the company we have now is a very different beast.

Of course, there are a number of individuals out there claiming that the reason Google is killing Reader is to draw more users into Google+. This claim doesn't actually stand up under scrutiny though, and it certainly doesn't stand up for a use case like mine. Since it's a Google product, Reader is extremely well integrate with +. This means for people like me, it's one of the few things that gets me to use Google+ at all since it offers me the ability to easily post a piece of content I like directly to a specific circle or circles on +. This is what I'm losing with Reader, and unless there's some other feed reader out there that offers me this capability, it means Google is losing most of my activity on +.

As far as I know Google hasn't been forthcoming enough with + APIs to make it easy for other services to offer users like me the capability to easily post content from a content aggregator to specific Google+ circles. I'll miss this capability, but I suppose at least now I have a good reason to track down a feed aggregator that actually works well on iPad.