socialmedian: Google Reader's Social Evolution

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Google Reader's Social Evolution

Source: Google Operating System

Jul 16, 2009

Summary

For more than a year, Google Reader has been struggling to add social features and almost all the new features were contrived, difficult to use and only cluttered the interface.

Originally, Google Reader's only social feature was sharing items in a public page. The trouble was that the shared page was difficult to find and users had to email the URL to their friends. Then Google Reader decided to automatically add your shared items to the reading list of your Google Talk friends, but those people weren't necessarily your friends and some were even added automatically by Gmail if you communicated often. Eight months later, Google Reader started to let you create a custom friend list.

Sharing an item wasn't enough as users couldn't explain why the post was interesting. To make things more complicated, Google Reader added "share with note". "Use the "Share with note" button on the item toolbar to create a copy of that item with your own note attached to it," explained Jenna Bilotta.

Sometimes the annotations were debatable and you wanted to post a reply, but Googl ...Read the full article

Comments (1)

Todd,

Jul 16, 2009

A good piece - covers the difficulties Google is facing as it tries to integrate popular social features of Friendfeed and others into what was originally a spare interface.