bitful

I am a perfecly happy Google Reader user and have very little to say about it that is negative. Feeds are my main source of information and I have tried many readers (Kinja, Netvibes, Attensa, Bloglines) before settling on Google's product.

For a brief period, I used the 'share' feature in Google Reader with some items that I deemed interesting. The advantage: one-click sharing from within Google Reader. The inconvenience: having to copy them into del.icio.us to keep all my bookmarks together, nicely tagged and in sync with Firefox.

I was perfectly aware that those were items I was willing to share; this made it a bit too limiting for me and I quickly decided to stop using that feature.

So I was not surprised in the least when on 14 December Google announced that it was going to make your shared items very visible to all your friends in Google Talk.

Many people complained, as there is no way to hide items from people (some of my del.icio.us bookmarks are set to 'private', for instance). Google's answer, for now, is (in my own words) 'remove people you don't want to share with from your contacts' (!), or 'delete all your shared items and start afresh with stuff you do want to share'.

I don't know where to stand on this one. It's a nice feature that may suit many people. I understand some can be annoyed, but I guess the word 'shared' sort of gave it away from the start really.

UPDATE (26 Dec 2007 at 5:58am): Steve Rubel has a workaround to mark shared items as private with tags, and so has Google.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 9:33 am and last modified on December 28th, 2007 at 9:41 pm, and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.