Up until last night, I was a huge user of Google Reader. It was a little-known gem amongst the google products and my absolute go-to for new information.

For the uninitiated, Google Reader is a single site that aggregated new posts from any blog I wanted to follow. Instead of visiting each blog individually, I take the blog's RSS feed (basically, something that updates each time there's a new blog post), add it to Google Reader, and then I can read the blog posts within Reader - they all magically appear there.

It also has the concept of folders, and posts being "read" and "unread", like email. You can tell Reader to show you only things you haven't read yet, to avoid having to trawl through hundreds of posts to find one. You can sort similar blogs together,  to read all the new posts on 'writing' or 'funny cat pictures' at once. If an article is particularly interesting, or you don't have time to read it right now, you can 'mark as unread', like an email, and it'll sit there waiting for you, easily accessible.* This is vital for people like me, who only have time to access Reader a few days out of the week - I can sift through stuff quickly, mark what I want to actually read as unread, and come back to it later.

But the great thing about Reader was that I could share things with people. On Reader, you had Followers - people who were interested in things you found. If you found an interesting article or blog post (or even a static web page, thanks to a now-deceased "Note In Reader" bookmarklet) you could share it, and it would appear under your name on your followers' Reader as an unread post. Other people could share it with people who followed them, and so on. You could also comment on shared posts, and those comments would show up under a "Comment view" as being unread. There was an entire social community that grew organically around the curation and discussion of interesting information.

This 'read/unread' comment aspect meant you could have lengthy discussions about a topic over several weeks or months without it 'disappearing' - each new comment would bring the whole post (and comments) back as 'unread' into the Comments view (but not the share folders, so you could tell it was a new comment on a post you'd already read, not a new post). It didn't matter if the other person was in another timezone, or only had time to comment every other week, because the comment or post would happily sit there and wait until they were ready.

Google just nerfed all of that.

Reader still aggregates blog feeds, but there are NO social aspects. Every social element has been shunted into Google plus, which is rather like handing me a hammer and telling me unscrew some furniture. It's just not the right tool. Yet.

I have nothing against Google plus. And while I think it was rather short sighted of them to cripple one good app to support another, I can understand why they'd want to narrow their focus this way.

But Plus cannot work for Reader as it stands now.

The primary problem is the lack of the 'read/unread' concept. Google plus puts everything into a 'stream'. So instead of folders I can click on, everything's just passing by. If I don't check in several times every day - and I don't, I have a life - I will miss things. If I want to check on something someone posted two weeks ago, I have to navigate manually back through the stream looking for it. This is compounded by the fact that Plus is designed as a social network (ie Facebook), not a place to share and curate interesting information. In order to read about a cool article about photons and particle physics, I also have to read someone's latest report on their foot fungus, or what they dressed their cat in last night. In short - Plus does not distinguish between what people share because it's interesting and what people share because it's about themselves, and I can't keep track of posts that I did find interesting amid the clutter.

What Google Plus Needs In Order To Replace Reader:

I've accepted that sharing is now on Google Plus only. I'll leave aside the nonsense of forcing your "customers"** to move from using one site to two for doing the same thing. But in order for Google Plus to function in any real way as a reader-sharing-replacement (and therefore keep your product-base happy), you need to borrow a few things from gmail and reader - chiefly, the concept of read/unread posts. For example:

• There are a list of my circles on the left. Next to each, in brackets, put the number of unread items in each circle (a la reader).
• When I select, scroll past or click on a post, mark it as read.
• Give me the ability to keep a post unread, as in reader, and allow me to filter the stream of any given circle to 'unread posts only'.

This will allow me to skim through the posts of a circle without worrying that I've missed anything, and keep a tab on things I want to read later, which can then be easily found - ie, use Google Plus as I once used Reader. As an additional wishlist feature - let me "mark all as read" , which should be a no-brainer once the above is implemented.

Secondly, have a similar indicator for unread comments:

• Perhaps a speech bubble next to each circle which indicates the number of posts that have unread comments on them.
• Clicking that speech bubble should give me the Comments view of posts shared to or within this circle that have been commented on, where I can view all, or view unread only.

And thus returns the asynchronous conversations that populated Reader - I can read something, think about it, come back and comment without worrying that I or anyone else will "lose" that post. A lengthy discussion about a topic can occur without having to occur right now - I don't need to worry that I'll forget about it once it drops off the page. And neither of these features would be particularly intrusive to Google Plus users.

Lastly - and perhaps this is more a personal request - Plus should have a filter for self-posts. A self-post being one that does not contain a link to an external page or post, and therefore is presumably just you ruminating about yourself. As I said above - I'm not particularly enthralled at having to crawl through what is essentially Facebook tripe to get to interesting articles. There are times when you want to read about someone's kid's first xylophone, and times when it just gets in the way. A method of optionally filtering out posts that don't provide a link would be fantastic. Great self-posts would almost certainly be shared by other people, and therefore still appear in the non-self-post feed, but the majority of the facebook drivel (let's face it, most of it is only of interest to the person doing the writing) would be invisible.

While these suggestions won't solve the issue of Reader now essentially being "split" over two sites, or of Plus's interface really not being suited to reading posts, it would provide forlorn Reader-users with a replacement that actually functions something like the original (or hell - actually functions).

At  the moment, Google seems to not be thinking things through - to be making design decisions without considering the user base, app intention and function, or usability. For a company with the brains and the money that they have, there's no excuse for decisions this poorly thought-out. It smacks of arrogance - that we, the users, can either put up or leave. And arrogance is rarely the most prudent way to success. Forget the glib 'don't be evil' motto, let's try for 'don't be stupid'.

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*For 30 days. After which it gets marked as unread and moved into a magic place that's only accessible through a bizarre linky-looking-glass, because someone at all the monkey's cheese and decided that we all have a thirty-day memory span.  But once you know it does that, that's easy enough to work around.

**Because we're not really customers, we're the product. But to keep us as products, you need to treat us as customers.