Library clips

It seems some special type of Google Reader users are allowed to list their subscriptions or a selected type of reading list (or blogroll) on their “Shared Items” webpage.

Compare my “Shared Items” webpage to Barack Obama.

Now check out this promo page where you can choose from a list of Google Reader Users “Shared Items” webpages.

This is coming into the newsmastering territory, because we also get merged streams of “Shared Items” pages.

For example on this promo page it offers a link to the “Shared Items” webpages of both Barack Obama and John McCain, but it also shows a merged stream of content from both these pages, and a merged feed.
Also on this promo page are links to the “Shared Items” webpages of several journalists, and it also shows a merged stream of content from all these journalists, and a merged feed.

Both of these merged streams have webpages of their own, here’s Barack Obama and John McCain, and here’s the journalists.

So imagine…

…making your own “Shared Items” group pages, I think this will be available soon.

Get ten of your friends and create a group “Shared Items” webpage…list a link to each person’s “Shared Items” webpage, and display a mixed stream of content from all ten “Shared Items” webpages, and to be able to subscribe to one spliced feed from all these pages.

I wonder if it would delete duplicates, and if the duplicate had a “note” it would also appear on the original item.
It would also be good to click on a person from the list and limit the stream to just their “Shared Items”, rather than only having the option to launch to a new window.

Actually this kind of reminds me of a FriendFeed Room, but these rooms don’t just re-syndicate content, you can also manually post right into the page, and on top of that also have discussions.

I also wonder whether the stream will do the FriendFeed type of thing or TechMeme where you can have a popular filter.

Not long ago I posted about Google Reader Shared Items, and was looking for a way to shop for people’s shared items and manually subscribe to them.
I was hoping when I subscribed to them it would appear in the “Friends’ Shared Items” section, but this isn’t the case, this only happens if they are your Gmail Contacts, you cannot manually subscribe to someone into this folder.

This is still the case, but the latest from the Google Reader blog is that you can now choose who of those Gmail contacts are allowed to see your Shared Items in their “Friends’ Shared Items” section. Even if I do prevent a few people from seeing my Shared Items, they could somehow still find my “Shared Items” webpage and subscribe from there…as I mentioned it would just be a regular feed subscription, they would not be able to organise that feed into their “Friends’ Shared Items” section.

How it happens is you can leave your setting on “Share with all my Chat contacts”, or you can now select “Share with Friends”.
This allows you to select particular people from your chat contacts into a more selective friends list.

If you do select a few people to see your “Shared Items”, they will be sent an email, where they can accept, and offer to share their “Shared Items” with you…at any time either of you can disable each other.

The more exciting news is that you can also add email addresses of people you want to add to your friends list, if they don’t have a Google Account, you will have to wait till they create one, if they do have a Google account, they will immediately be available for selection for your friends list (I guess this means they become a Gmail contact). Actually this isn’t exciting at all, only more convenient, because beforehand all I would have to do from Gmail is give them an invite and they would become one of my contacts, consequently they would then become available as my Google Reader contacts.

Read about it in the help section.

What I don’t get is why does someone have to be a Gmail contact first before I can add them to my friends list, or if I do invite a person and they do register with Gmail, then they automatically become a Gmail contact.

As I said in my previous post I simply want to roam around a Google Reader Social Network and simply add someone as a friend, and they have to friend me back.
Then I have the OK to subscribe to their Shared Items, and it will appear in my “Friends’ Shared Items” section…they can always disable me.
The beauty of this is we could also check out each others subscription pane’s…feed shopping.

Now that we have friended each other we could attack another issue in my previous post, and that is if I want to share an item with a particular friend instead of clicking the email footer button I could click a share with friend button, and select some friends I want to send this item to…and it would land in their Google Reader inbox.

I’m thinking of Google Reader looking like Facebook, but when I think of it like this maybe it does make sense to only have one friends list across all Google products. In a Google Reader social network the private message feature would be Gmail, and the chat section would be Gtalk….can’t remember if you can organise your contacts into friends lists.

When I think of it making a Google Reader friends list from my Gmail contacts, is similar to just making a selective contact list in Gmail and then pushing that to appear in Google Reader, only it’s more convenient to do it from within Google Reader.

I wonder if we could make multiple friends lists.

At the moment, as explained in my previous post, the manual way is to create a tag, and make that tag page public, and tell your friends about it so they can subscribe to that page as a regular Google Reader subscription (or they could subscribe in any RSS Reader, it doesn’t matter). Whenever you add an item to that tag, your friends that are subscribed to it will see the new content.