Tag Archives: Social network

Save Google Reader

Google Reader icon

I really didn’t expect to be posting anything today, certainly not this, but it seems to be quite urgent, so here I am. Google is planning to (finally) give Google Reader an overhaul. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been looking forward to that for a long time. But what I didn’t expect is that instead of integrating gReader’s social functions with G+, they’re replacing the former with the latter. No more “people you follow” feed, no more “comments view”, no more of my little clutch of gReader buddies, formed around the mutual opinion that each of the others shares interesting stuff. These people have introduced me to some of the most interesting pieces of reading I’ve come across, many of which have ended up linked to on this blog or influencing my thinking and writing.

Here are some of the posts about the shuttering that have come up (in “people you follow”, of course):

These are all pretty short and worth reading. There is also a petition to Google not to go through with this.
I’ve mentioned in a recent comment that I’ve slowly started reading less on Google Reader because I can’t keep up with everything. Well, the one area that is consistently 90% read-worthy is “people you follow”. Killing the social part of gR will kill the whole service for me, I’m afraid.

Don’t get me wrong: I like Google+, I like it when social networks get an overhaul, even when it forces me to change how I use them. I’m the guy who can’t wait to see the new Facebook newsfeed, not the guy who shakes his fist at Zuckerberg every time the interface is improved. Heck, I’ve specifically been waiting impatiently for a new gReader interface ever since I saw the Preview theme on Gmail. But moving the social features out of gReader will make me very sad.

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Sharing links

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, where, and with whom I share interesting links I find. I first realized that sharing mainly on Facebook doesn’t make so much sense, since things I share there only reach my relatively list of friends, and only some of them are interested in each of the different topics that interest me. I’ve also started realizing that sharing links on Google Reader (which I do a lot) has basically the same problem (except worse, since I have 40 instead of 400 followers.)

Many of the things I want to share I want to share because I want to help make them public and spread. Since I’ve started using Twitter a lot lately, I guess Twitter is a good venue for this; links reach more people and can spread through Twitter’s huge, globe-spanning network. Of course, like all things Twitter, they easily get drowned out in the never-ending feed.

Of course there’s this blog of mine right here, but it’s too much work to blog all those links. I have to explain what it is I’m posting and why, and I read more than I could do that for.

But I might set up a separate feed for links, using Tumblr or something. Would anyone reading this be interested in that? Would anyone follow it?

Any other ideas?