I love Google reader, but this new "feature" is the first time I'm thinking about looking elsewhere. It's so irrelevant which people "like" something I'm reading, I just can't fathom how they could think it's a good idea to shove that information in my face. The thing that amazes me is that there are so many other ideas they could be pursuing with Reader that play to their strengths. For example: lots of my RSS feeds talk about the same thing. A link gets put up here on Hacker News, but then it also gets discussed on Slashdot, Wired, etc... Google is good at automated content analysis. Why not experiment with ways to combine and merge feeds based on the content so I can read everything about a single topic in one spot? That would be truly useful and something you can't get anywhere else.

In some sense, I feel like these new features are a bit lazy on their part. They're sort of avoiding doing anything innovative or novel and instead are just jumping on the social networking bandwagon to give the illusion of progress.