A lot of people have commented on the new social features which have been released for Google’s RSS Reader – and most of them have been pretty positive.
Recent changes have included showing more information on who likes and shares posts, and being able to connect with more people who have interested with content you like. And the option to ‘Send To’ various listed or custom social networks from Google Reader has also been a step towards improving the influence it has.
Both the basic ideas behind the improvements are good ones, so it’s just a shame that there are a couple of major niggles which mean they’re not as good as they could have been.
Firstly, I use Google Reader for around 2 hours every day when I’m travelling to and from work by train. The access to free wifi means it’s completely replaced ever bothering with a newspaper or magazine, and I can get all the information that I’ve requested delivered to me.
But it also means that the fact the Send To option doesn’t occur within the reader itself means that I’m still stuck waiting for other pages to load before I can Stumble them, for example, and that’s no at option on shared wifi. It still means attempting (and failing) to remember which articles I loved and going back to promote them when I’m on a better connection.
Secondly, and this is the biggest problem – the more people sharing with me, the more times I’m seeing duplicate content. In some cases, the same feed item can appear 4 or 5 times – once from my own subscription and then numerous times from my friends and contacts.
That means I’m loathe to add anyone, particularly in my areas of interest, because I’ll end up with 200 items every day that I’ve already seen, added to the 150+ that I get anyway.
It’s frustrating, because I’d love to see what a ton of people are sharing, and it’s a nice alternative to short urls with no explanation on Twitter.
Still, it’s good to see Google investing some time and effort in Reader, even if the supply side of Feedburner is as flakey as ever.
And there’s also an interesting Greasemonkey script for Firefox (called gReactions) which has just been released to show blog comments, Friendfeed, Twitter, Digg, Hacker News and Reddit underneath each post.