Where is the real Google Reader social network?
Google Readers friends or contacts feature is just a tease, and not exactly the approach I would take. I wrote about the ideal scenario in my post Google Reader going social: Step One.
In this post I mentioned FeedEachOther, this is a true RSS Reader social network…Google Reader could make my day and take a look at this brilliant site.
For more on Feed Each Other (FEO), take a look at my post Feed Each Other : the Facebook of RSS Readers.
This post is similar to the two linked above, here are my 7 concise points:
1.My GTalk contacts are not the same as my potential Google Reader contacts
- I know you can hide these contacts from Google Reader
- but, at the moment if I want to add personA as a Google Reader contact I have to add them to GTalk. I find it weird to have to chat with someone (or add them as your chat buddy at the least) in order to add them as a Google Reader contact and see their Shared Items
2. How do I know who is a user of Google Reader in the first place?
- I’d like to search a user database and visit a person’s profile (or like Facebook, request as a friend first before seeing their profile)
- once confirmed they are added as a contact to my friends shared items, and I would also be able to click a link to visit a public version of their Google Reader
3. Public Profiles
- once at their profile I could see what feeds they read, and who their friends are…networking is the most trusted way for quality discovery
- plus all the other goodies like message a friend (Gmail, GTalk), comment wall, etc…
4. Default shared items are OK, but this is more a network stream (also filter by person)
- like FEO you can click on a contacts shared items or a river of news of shared items from all your contacts, this is a network stream of posts your contacts are sharing with the world (not with you in particular)
5. What about sharing being one to one, rather than just one to many
- you can do this by tagging items with personA’s name and they can subscribe to that tag, but this should be easier
- you can email an item to a contact, why not also be able to share this item with personA within Google Reader, with the simple click of a button…I’m not saying private message the item, I’m saying sending the item to that person’s friend stream
- the way you could filter these posts is, show me Shared Items from personA, then, of these items, which are the one’s explicitly shared with me
- or their could be two streams, one for Shared Items with the world, and one for Shared Items to just me
(as someone may share an item with me which is not necessarily in their Shared Items feed…they may share the item with me because they know I will like it, this same item may be of no personal interest to them).
Share a link with a selection of friends
- another choice in Google Reader is to tag items with a group name, and then person A,B,C,D can subscribe to this same tag…this is handy when wanting to share the same item to a bunch of people
- FEO makes this easier by organising your contacts into groups, so you can share an item with a bunch of people in one click. Unlike Google Reader, there is no need to send these people an RSS feed to subscribe to, this is too manual, instead the system works it all out in the background.
Share a link to a group/topic page
- can’t remember if FEO has topic/group pages, Streamy does (a similar RSS Reader social network)
- this means not only can you share a link with the world in general, with a friend, with a selection of your friends, but also to a group/topic page
6. Comment on shared items
- like FEO or even del.icio.us I’d like to be able to leave a description on an item I’m sharing, and others can leave comments
- only problem is that you don’t want Google Reader to steal the comment space from the blogosphere, personally I’d rather comments on my posts rather than in another system/s
Streamy (mentioned above) also allows you to post notes, like blog posts, ie. posting text without having to share a link.
7. News feed
- Like FEO I’d like to see an activity feed of what my contacts are doing (like the Facebook News feed)
- eg. shay just added the feed “profy”
- eg. richy shared this item with dee
- eg. neilo added becky as a friend (that is, he visited her profile and chose to subscribe to her Shared Items)
More
Just had another thought, subscribing to personA’s shared items doesn’t equate to adding as a friend.
At the moment if I know of a Google Reader users Shared Items page/RSS feed I can subscribe to it, it will appear in my regular subscription set, rather than my friend Share items subscription set.
If Google Reader was more social I could roam around profiles and grab their Shared Items feed, this doesn’t mean I want to add this person as a friend. I can go to any social bookmark site and grab a users feed, this doesn’t mean I want to be their friend, it just means I’m subscribing to their link blog, just like I may subscribe to their blog.
Now, if I did want to add someone as a friend, this would go a bit further, not only would they appear as a subscription in my Friends Shared Items set, they would also appear as a node in my friend list, and I could message them, share items with them, etc…
Let’s not forget if this friend I’m adding doesn’t have Shared Items to my liking I can just hide them like I can do now in Google Reader. But, what’s important about the friendship is that if they want to message me or share an item with me in particular they can do so (this item may or may not appear in their Shared Items feed).
At the moment to share an item with one person only in Google Reader it’s a manual process of setting up a tag, and getting that person to subscribe to it…the other way is to Gmail that person
…let’s hope for better things to come!
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
While what you propose may be a useful service for some (read: Scoble), a “Google Reader social network” is hardly the problem we should be trying to solve. It is merely a feature in the far more complex realm of content discovery and efficient consumption of media.
First, allow me to state the obvious:
The concept of link sharing has been around for years (did we forget del.icio.us? Digg?), and lifestreaming services now attempt to aggregate all those sources (and Google Reader Shared Items is now one of them). Those users who really want to “connect” with people who consume the same stuff they do can easily start with MyBlogLog or newcomers such as FriendFeed (or Twitter, Facebook).
At the end of your post you mention a host of capabilities that are already implemented in the ever-beta-testing Streamy. The thing is… for all that cool stuff to work, your buddies must be using the same feed reader. And that defeats the whole purpose, because for what you want to work efficiently, again you must alienate yourself from everyone else.
From what I can tell, FeedEachOther is an interesting service and they clearly mean well. However, I don’t think that the value proposition is compelling enough for users to switch to this new feed reader when the majority of their “existing” friends are elsewhere.
And now to my point:
The innovation in this space lays in the improvements of content discovery, recommendation mechanisms THAT WORKS, introduction to new topics of interest as opposed to spending the whole day reading 50 posts about Facebook and Scoble, “attention clustering” Techmeme-style, access to quality content that gets archived on the web and remains forgotten and inaccessible once it is dropped from the RSS feed, etc.
Then, and only then, you package it all nicely and build Yet-Another-Social-Network around it. Not the other way around.
RSS readers and our current content consumption habits are where we were with the web in 1995… Hopefully that will change very soon.
Comment by Aviv — January 9, 2008 @ 7:00 am
Wow, what a comment Aviv, thanks for that, and it seems like you have something in the works.
I understand that Google Reader is just one system, and using a lifestream service may allow inclusion of more people as we can all still use the RSS Readers we like, but then we still have to register with a lifestream system…it’s always the catch.
I was thinking about ways to connect blogs without having to live in a service like MyBlogLog:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/12/14/blogosphere-as-a-distributed-social-network/
Here are a few other posts:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/07/22/friendstreams/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/10/11/blog-network-as-your-social-filter/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/07/11/collaborative-recommendation/
I wrote about clustering here:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/02/09/google-reader-needs-clustering-and-more/
What do you propose for recommendation and content discovery, doesn’t a social network do this, doesn’t del.icio.us do this, doesn’t megite do this…these features can be part of Google Reader.
Comment by Johnt — January 9, 2008 @ 10:31 pm
Dude. Just switch to FEO already. You know you want to
Comment by Udi — January 10, 2008 @ 2:56 am