The Overly Tedious, Long, & Complex Way to Migrate Your Google Reader Friend Settings to Google Plus as A Circle

Even that title feels over long and complex – but as I learned in a conversation with Google+ expert Chris Lang, people who have this issue get it immediately. People who think we are under the mistaken belief that we’re going to lose our contacts don’t necessarily get what our actual problem is, understandably. To business…

Love that Google Reader is going to be part of Google+ – hate that Google didn’t find a seamless, automated way to migrate the way my current connections in Google Reader go to Google Plus all at once.

Now as it stands here alone, this is not a big deal.

However, this is made more complex by the fact that I keep the set of folks I want to migrate on a separate account, for organization, but want to use Google+ from one central account.

I am, by far, not the only one with this problem. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

I’ve got one friend who is on their FIFTH move from a previously separate GMail account in the name of an attempt to merge all their identities on to one Google+ profile, only to find out later that Google reversed their position on pseudonyms, which is what this painter/singer is known best by outside of his day job.

From what they said, there’s no indication that Google Reader’s current friend view as a subset of Google contacts will be available from Google+, although it looks like you could get an archive of your stuff:

As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

via Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google+ features, and some clean-up.

Well, bully for that, but I invested time in getting my Google Reader connections set up a certain way and they were like that for years. Now I have to reinvest time because you think Google+ is sexier? And I have to do it in less than a week?

How about some forethought here? How about not alienating people who like Google Reader and Google+ by making it the transition harder than it has to be?

If you’re not having this issue, you can pretty much stop reading here, because this will get long.

It will get ranty and then there will be some instructions you will hate following but are your only option.

Your take-away here, if the rest of this has nothing to do with you is: how does the ordinary person grow comfortable trusting their information to a company that keeps getting rid of things they like?

Or merging them with other things in a non-seamless fashion? Especially when they make the move as difficult as possible?

Hard moves kill platforms. They do.

Right now it’s only affecting the margins. I didn’t understand what the big deal was for people who wanted to move from Facebook to Google+ before. I thought “you can’t possibly know that many people that this is such a big deal.”

I get it now.

I really hope I’m premature in speculating that the transition will be manual and unpleasant but with the change set to roll out within 7 days of the announcement, which was last week, hoping for the best doesn’t seem to be a great strategy.

It seems like there should be an automated way on the software end to turn my Buzz/Reader contacts into a circle,  then invite the ones who aren’t on Google+ yet to join. And of course, Google Reader is not listed in Google Takeout.

The only options in Google Takeout currently are to either download an archive of my Buzz posts (unhelpful, and the links were converted to plus.google.com links anyway) or my contacts.

Downloading my contacts as they now stand is also unhelpful because I hadn’t put my Google Buzz people in a separate group – I don’t want to invite EVERYONE that I know on Google to the new Google Reader, I just want to keep the subset of people who I used Google Reader with as its own group without having to manually rebuild the group.

This seems very poorly thought out, or a tiptoe around the privacy issue. I’d have a lot more respect for them coming right out and saying either – we don’t have a migration tool for reasons of privacy/other than for there to be no real explanation for this omission.

At the very least, some way for me to mass add all of my Google Reader contacts to a separate contacts group, export that group of contacts to a file and then upload that into Google+  would work. But in Google reader, you can’t even get them on one screen. Maybe it’s the privacy issues but again, it seems like software could address that.

No. Instead, if all the contacts are on the same account, you have no choice but to:

• Create a Circle for your Google Reader people.
• Toggle back and forth between Google Reader and Google+ to see what GR people are in the G+ circle you want to create one at a time, and
• Create a circle for them manually.

My writer’s account has 2000 real world contacts. And I’m sorry, I’m not going to send an email to a major publishing house editor who I haven’t spoken to in a month on the phone to please put themselves in my Google+ circle. That’s ridiculous.

Now, I could just use that profile whenever I want to talk to writers on Google+, if it were that simple. But who wants to toggle back and forth between two Google profiles, or have to constantly answer the question “which Tinu account should I follow?”

Not I.

So, of course you’ll want to merge all your identities into one, which is even MORE fun.  And even after you do all this, remember, you can’t just turn a contacts group into a circle. You have to do that part manually as shown above. You can probably pay someone to do this. If you have an assistant or can budget for someone to do this, that’s my suggested answer.  It is a bunch of tedious BS.

1. In Google Reader settings, change your sharing settings from Public to private – if you try to create groups with  the public sharing setting on you cannot group your contacts.
2. Go to Google Contacts and create a separate group for the people you want to put into a circle (NO you can’t do this from within Google Reader).
3. Manually add your Google Reader contacts into the created group. Yes, if you have other contacts in that account other than the people you interact with in Google Reader, you MUST put them in a separate group if you want to be able to export JUST those people. It only shows about 25 per screen, so you have to keep pressing more or whatever at the bottom.
4. Go back to Google Contacts.
5. Export those contacts, then upload them into Google Plus.

It also seems stupid that we only have a week to make this work. I only use Google Reader about once a week – I could have easily missed this news and the migration, and then been really stuck.

If you know of an easier way, please let me know.

Now as it stands here alone, this is not a big deal. If this is the one and only sacrifice you have to make to use Google Reader the way you’d like to in Google Plus, we should all be so lucky, despite the tedium, it’s not like it’s once a year, it’s once for life.

But. This is not a one-time switchover for many of us. By about the 3rd move, some of us are throwing up our hands and saying we’ll stick with one of those other platforms we don’t really like but make us happy. After all, when they wanted us to move, they made it so easy.