this is what Reader was and has always made me even more confused as to why Google killed it off. They had the right start for a unique take on content focused/small group discussion based social networking and the tossed it for “circles”
Google itself is part of Big Tech Social Control. They're not willing to engage in services where they're not ultimately in control, like RSS. They suffered in the short term, but if you've struggled to find the RSS feed for a website or a podcast lately, that's exactly what they were trying to achieve.