#FF00AA

Since the announcement yesterday, more than 10% of my personal timeline has complained about the impending death of Google Reader. I’m not talking about Silicon Valley pundits here, but French people I know personally: geeks, to be sure, but not professional ones. Actually, just the kind of early adopters, of influencers even, that Google would so desperately like to see using Plus.

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? They’re not shuttering Reader because it can’t be monetized — there are so many ways it could be — or because it’s dying a natural death, but because they’re annoyed that we haven’t obeyed their orders to move over to Plus. So obviously the rational response, the efficient reaction, is to pettily get rid of the social tool we’re actually using, the service they could be monetizing. That’ll teach us.

Here’s a hint, Google: conquering the social space is not about designing a service behind closed doors and telling people to go and use it. It’s about observing what people are doing and what they want to do, and letting them do that. The example to follow here is the way Twitter adopted mentions, and retweets, and so on; not the way Twitter is currently trying to shed its third-party clients now that it has succeeded.