A couple of hours ago Google pushed the recently announced changes to Google Reader. As the accompanying blog post says:

Today we’re rolling out the new Reader design, and the Google+ features that we mentioned just over a week ago. Before the day’s over, all Reader users will be able to enjoy the following improvements::

• A new look and feel that’s cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at.
• The ability to +1 a feed item (replacing “Like”), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (replacing “Share” and “Share with Note”).
• Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we’ll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality.

Since i’m a heavy user especially of  sharing items i was very eager what this means to me.

The result: Right now, nothing has changed,

The reason for this is that Google retired this features only on the surface level and kept the underlying API.  So, while i’m unable to share from the new Google Look & Feel, right now i am able to:

1. Share via Reeder from my iPad, iPhone etc. Since i’m doing nearly all my reading from the iPad basically nothing has changed for me.
2. Share via the installed Note in Reader Bookmarklet
3. View my updated shared item feed
4. Use the old version of Google Reader to share items.  I still had Google Reader open in a tab.This version is fully functional and i’m able to use it in parallel to the new version in another  tab-
5. Open the People you follow page form the old version of Google Reader  and use it with the bew Look & Feel

Note to Google: Make the “classic” version available as a theme

[blackbirdpie id=”131250552993615873″]

All this makes it clear that there is no technical reason for not having the old and the new version of Google Reader available in parallel. So Google, act up to the Google Reader Petition and make the “Classic” Version available as a configuration option / theme. You can even keep the new look and make the +1 Version the default theme. You can even turn it into an easter egg, e.g. embed the functionality with a display:none style (Greasemonkey etc) here i come.  Just don’t retire the inofficial API.

If this is not going to happen, resp.  there are a couple of plan Bs, including switching to starring instead of sharing,building a greasemonkey script that fuses the share functionality from the bookmarklet into the page, using a customized SendTo in conjunction with PressThis on a WP blog (would right now not work with Reeder) etc.

Update

Just bought Reeder for the Mac to be able to easily share from the Desktop again.