Well, let's put "massive" in quotes. It could have been a boost of influential people had it worked (well, some tech bloggers and HN users, but still), but let's not kid ourselves about "massive".
Second:
> Yes, just that simple…make it so that you could follow an RSS feed as though it were another user in G+. Make it so that you could put RSS feeds into circles, and share them, just like you do with other G+ users.
If you had taken Reader and replaced it with this it would have infuriated me at the time, and would have been been the same result as far as I would have been concerned: Reader would be dead. This would not have worked.
That embrace would probably have killed off RSS within a couple years anyway, since native G+ posts have more attractive window dressing, but the move would have been a dead simple way to build an instant, passionate userbase that could have taken advantage of G+'s commenting and sharing features while providing a meta-view of how users like to sort sources into Circles.
G+ could easily have been marketed as Reader 2.0, married to Facebook 2.0 for social, Instagram 2.0 for advanced photo features, and Dropbox 2.0 for hoarding. I have no idea how Google dropped the ball at the endzone.
Then you haves News, Social, Photo, Video, Files, and Office too. Add some games and there is pretty much everything anybody does on a computer.
Facebook's events are one of it's great features, but it took Google ages to implement them, despite already having a calendar that's synced with every Android phone.
The problem with that model was that publishers tended to dump their feed onto Buzz, and then engage with people via Twitter.
Of course, it's possible to ignore the lack of engagement, with the hope it will come later, and instead concentrate on the information consumer (call it "consumer-centric").
The problem with the consumer-centric model is that on its own it doesn't drive traffic, either to the app itself (GReader/Buzz/FriendFeed) or to the publisher.
That makes it a hard sell. It's difficult to know what could be done differently to fix this problem.
The argument was super compelling and I remember thinking it would have made complete sense, but instead ended up with the nightmare that became Google+, and a ton of pissed off former-users of Reader.
*EDIT: Found it: http://www.scottporad.com/2014/04/24/a-totally-simply-way-go...
"Google could have avoided angry Reader users and given Google+ a massive boost by simply integrating Reader into Google+.
Yes, just that simple…make it so that you could follow an RSS feed as though it were another user in G+. Make it so that you could put RSS feeds into circles, and share them, just like you do with other G+ users.
If Google would have done that G+ would have taken off like wildfire and nobody would have ever looked back. I have no idea why they didn’t, but for some reason the lost potential has irritated me for a year. And, here we are now, with the whole effort going down the tubes.
What a waste."
Makes sense to me...