Why do you say Google killed Reader? It may have moved down in the menu hierarchy, but it works fine still. They did, however, kill the project that allowed you to subscribe to html instead of RSS and google would compare versions of a page and generate RSS of differences, possibly that's what you were thinking of.

Sorry, I shouldn't have said "killed". The commenting on articles in the context of reader was great. We had bunches of gmail friends who would get some good conversations going . Buzz extended that and for a while it was high-quality at least for us.

Do you remember the protests outside of Google offices when they removed that ? One couple even met through reader and got married.

The shared items RSS out was another sad loss. I had set up one client so that he could select news items using that and they would show on his site as industry news. I used it to post stuff to my own site.

Oh, and recommended items basically sucks now and related feeds rarely returns anything. It was like they removed the google magic and left it as just a feed reader.

There's always cost to keeping old code around. With any given Google product, regardless of how unpopular it is, there will always be people unhappy that it's been pulled. But it's healthy to have a focused set of products and to cull non-useful ones.

Also: they didn't kill google reader. And Google+ is not comparable to Buzz. Google is clearly not going to kill that off.