It also let you share content with your google friends before google+ existed. And this is why certain google execs should have been fired quickly.
instead of investing and figuring out a way to get your existing user base to contribute content to your new social network, you kill that user base and say that they have to transition in ful to google+. Instead, people were like "we're all talking about things on facebook, I'll just share the articles there"
google+ should have been a data platform with many different front ends (reader being one of them, the facebook clone being another). Instead they just wanted to make a facebook clone.
