The only thing left with any color of consequence it the obscenely red subscribe button in the top left, which in keeping with the spirit of prioritizing the exactly wrong thing — you don’t even need to use very often.
Reminds me of the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson quote:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds[…]
Consistency in interface design, applied correctly, is very useful. It helps someone leverage existing knowledge and past experience to more easily use something new. Just making things look the same without regard to each thing’s features and functionality is exactly what you shouldn’t do.
And I miss the “share” button which would post the article in my Google Reader Shared Items blog which I can link to Feedburner and auto-tweet my shared items. Bleh!
I wasn’t surprised that they removed the sharing features, though they did make a mess of it. I was more surprised that Google crippled search within Reader. You used to be able to constrain a search to one feed by typing the name of the feed into the box next to the search field. Alternately, you could use that field as a drop-down menu. Now, you can only use it as a menu, and in my case, with almost 500 feeds, some feeds are missing from the menu. So it’s now much harder to narrow a search within Reader.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given that they also sacrificed the + operator in web search.
I think the consistency is there and the focus on the subscribe button is just in line with the increased use case of Google Reader – Feed synchronization.
You pointed it out yourself – Google Reader is the place where you manage the subscriptions for the News Reader apps – so adding a new source is for me one of the most used functions – I actually often use the bookmarklet.