a convenient truth

This has been bubbling along for a few days now. Google have added some actual sharing functionality to their “share” function in Google Reader. I’ve been using it anyway - you can see my shared items on the side of my blog.

Now your shared items will be visible to your contacts in gmail or google talk. On the whole this seems OK - the whole point of sharing is to make them public.

There has been something of a backlash however, some of it reasonable and some rather less so. The reasonable point is that people were using the shared feed (a private RSS feed) to share items with a restricted set of people.

Most people, including me, have gmail and gtalk contacts who are friends and some who are business contacts. Now the gap between personal me and professional me is pretty small, but I am definitely the exception - and in my early twenties the gap was much larger. I have just become more boring, something I wouldn’t necessarily encourage. Many, more interesting, people are horrified at the idea of random professional contacts seeing their feeds.

Even for those of us with closely related professional and personal lives we manage those with a different conversational register, for which there does appear to be an emerging sort of protocol. This blog is my personal blog. We have a work blog too, but this is just me speaking for myself. I can say things here I wouldn’t say on the work blog not because I’m concerned that my professional contacts might see it, some of them probably will (hi there!), but because I trust them to understand that we do in fact legitimately have personal lives that diverge from our professional ones. Incidentally this blog isn’t private - if I wanted something to be private, I wouldn’t put it on the Internet (duh).

So, that point seems very fair to me - there needs to be more granularity in sharing. Share with specific users, or with groups or with all my contacts or with everyone.  Edit: And lo, they have. Not the best thought out solution, but having to roll it out on Christmas day won’t have cheered them up any.  Full marks.  I imagine a better solution will come along shortly.

There have been some other complaints. One that I’ve seen is that people have been using the sharing feed for random other things, and that now those other things won’t work. Well tough really I think.

And finally you get idiots like Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Profy.com, normally a pretty good tech news site, who has written this appallingly researched rubbish that is basically just full of lies.

I’d probably get all annoyed about how the blogosphere is so much less reliable than Mainstream Media now - except of course when this is picked up by the newspapers I expect they’ll do even less research, and publish even more rubbish.