Google is known for making decisions informed by data, often very large sets of it. That’s a great practice, and one that undoubtedly often leads to some smart moves and happy users. In this case, the Reader team probably saw that a relatively small number of people were using those features, and decided that it was probably safe to kill them off in favor of pushing users toward Google Plus, which is a big, new priority for the company. It’s ironic in a way, because in its big push to reposition itself as a social-friendly company, Google just displaced an entire community of users, effectively shutting down a social ecosystem that had existed for years.