This just in from the good people at Google:

Google is all about speed, both under the hood as well as in the user experience. So, in order to make Reader act and feel more speedy and responsive, we’ve removed some visual clutter, simplified some features and given everything a bit more breathing room. Out with the old rounded corners, drop shadows and heavily saturated colors — in with a softer palette, faster components and a fresh new look.
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We’ve heard you loud and clear. For some of you (and some of us on the Reader team), unread counts are a source of anxiety and can feel more like a to-do list than the random awesomeness of the Internet. So to help you sleep better at night, we’ve added the ability to turn off unread counts for each section of navigation independently.

Fucking Sadists. It’s new. It’s improved. It loads much faster. It takes me to the river and drops me in the water. Oh, and if you have GMail I sent you out an invite.

Update: Is Google becoming our collective brain?

By some estimates, Google has over half a million servers that each month crunch the equivalent of all the data in the entire library of congress 240 times over. Well over half of web users go to Google for answers to their questions, asking the machine over 400 million queries per day. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming our collective brain. Consider this: Google can now predict flu outbreaks weeks in advance simply by monitoring searches for flu terms (’sore throat’), and aggregating this based on location. They’ve launched this service as Google Flu Trends. ‘From a technological perspective, it is the beginning’, says Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. So where is this is all heading?