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.

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.