An Open Letter to the Google Plus and Reader Teams

Dear Google Plus and Reader Teams,

I've been tracking closely the development of both Plus and Reader; I was excited to try the former and have been a long-time user of the later. Reader has been an important tool in my digital toolset for years; I use it personally to track and read important news and updates from friends' blogs, and I have used it professionally and semiprofessionally as a monitoring tool for blogs, social media, and news.

Like many other Google Reader users I met the announcement of Reader's integration into Plus with some skepticism; at best I was cautiously optimistic. When I finally switched over yesterday I found the new UI different but nothing that would cause any permanent harm; I have suffered through UI and design pages on services beginning with the Prodigy network back in 1990. Although they cause short-term confusion there hasn't been a single instance where I've ceased to use a service because of a UI change. I would prefer something with more color delineation between posts, but you're receiving enough feedback about that from people far more qualified as designers than I am, so I'll leave that be.

The main piece of feedback I have about the new Reader is around its social sharing features. Reader's sharing features were, for myself and many others, a self-selected and silo'd social network. I followed users (offline friends mostly) who actively shared news and other content I found interesting, and would occasionally comment on that content and have conversations with each other. Rarely would these develop into full-blown conversations (and if they did we typically moved to IM), but the information discovery mechanisms of this service were invaluable to me both for professional development and personal enrichment.

I understand how to share content through Reader into Plus; this is not the issue. The frustrating thing about this change is that I no longer have the option to filter content from others in the same silo I had in Reader. This, frankly, was functionality I expected when Plus launched (if you check my account, it's one of my first Plus posts.)

Reader gave me a way to get content from a few people without drinking from the social media firehose of less-relevant updates. I love my friends to death but I don't want to have to filter through 10 pictures of their kids to get to the one news story they found interesting. Facebook doesn't allow for this kind of filtration, and neither did Plus when it launched – which would have been its defining competitive factor. This is the beauty of Reader's old system; if was a filtered network.

In short: rather than cloning Facebook's functionality, I wish Plus had been more like what Reader was in its content filtering.

My recommendation then is twofold:

1. Make a feature in Google Reader where you can automatically create a Plus circle from the people you've followed. This was a basic exporting beat Google completely missed; why should I manually have to recreate a circle of followed friends from one Google product into another? That should have been one click, or done automatically, behind the scenes. Google's value proposition is its platform ubiquity; this was a missed opportunity to demonstrate this is actually the case.

2. Within that circle (or within any circle in Plus) allow me to filter posts from people in that circle to only show +1s from Reader. I love my friends to death but don't want to cruise through a dozen pictures of kids in Halloween costumes to get to important news.

To put this a different way: turn circles into content silos, not just person groups.

In fact, this kind of filtering is what I expected from Plus in the first place. It would be a true differentiator from Facebook's platform, which forces me to filter in reverse, by blocking updates from certain apps like Farmville. Instead, Plus should allow you to filter down, only showing updates from certain apps that I self-select – like Reader, or Twitter, or a photo sharing site.
I will still continue to use Reader for my RSS feeds, and look forward to a Google app that duplicates the closed nature of the network in Reader I had come to appreciate and enjoy – and for which there is now an enormous gap (and opportunity) within the digital landscape.

I have long been an advocate of Google's services and overall value proposition for years. I may be one of the few Wave fans still left in existence. I understand that decisions like this are made at far larger levels than one piece of consumer feedback can ever hope to affect and change, but I certainly appreciate any consideration you'd give to the above recommendations.

Yummers!

It's safe to say Google Reader has completely changed how I receive information. I'm basically living in an RSS world now; Google Reader has become a second inbox where I obsessively look for updates on blogs, conversations and other sources of news (I love that my Xbox 360 activities are streaming through an RSS feed - say what you will about Microsoft and the Xbox 360, they hit a grand slam with the machine's Web 2.0 capabilities.) And the best part is, I can easily share interesting posts (see the new sidebar, which has - yes - supplanted my blogroll) and keep them for later - and as of a few days ago, I can search them too.

A long time ago I signed up for Del.icio.us, but haven't really used it for much. I gave it another look last night, and realized that I can stream my bookmarks as an RSS feed right into my Google reader, removing yet another degree of utility spread out over too many applications. Now I have a "Del.icio.us tag" button on Firefox, and when I read an interesting webpage it's a matter of tag, label, receive in RSS and share/store if I want.

What a great toy.

That Post Below? Irrelevant.

After a good midday conversation with Seth, I've discovered that I can now simply share my Shared items in Google Reader via an RSS feed.

Subscribe to my Shared Items.

In Praise of Google Reader

So I was chatting with Seth the other day and talking about RSS options - specifically ones that might work in Gmail. He reminded me that Google rolled out its Reader, so I figured I'd give it a try. Like Gmail, it's a web-based app. I'm a big fan of web-based tools since I started using Hotmail back in 1997 (before it was MSN Hotmail!) because it's one less piece of software clogging my registry and dragging my computer's speed down, and when you've got a half-dozen browser windows open at any given time it's easier to just have another browser open.

I like Gmail about 90% - my complaints are largely with its UI and the lack of ability to file email into folders - but Google Reader I like damn near 100%. It's easy to add RSS feeds, the reader behaves logically: your feeds are listed in alphabetical order, feeds with updates have numbers after then, you click on a feed and bring up the new posts, and most importantly it doesn't truncate posts and maintains the original formatting of pictures - something that many stand-alone apps don't.

One of my biggest complaints about many of the slick new web tools is that you often have to install a separate program or widget for each one. Instant messaging is a prime example - I don't want to have Skype, AIM, and MSN running all at once, and Trillian hasn't updated properly in years and its lack of modern functionality (especially MSN functionality) continues to be a growing problem. I want my functionality focused in one place, and having Gmail open in one tab and Reader open in another accomplishes that. They even share a menu structure, so I could theoretically just swap between them without even clicking away from either site, but I prefer having them both open at once so I don't miss anything.

It's also got some fun tools like "Trends," which tracks how many posts you read on each blog each day (compared with how many you just "mark as read" or skip), so if you're curious about your reading habits, Reader will helpfully track them for you.

Best of all: it's all integrated into my Google account, so I can take it anywhere I'm online. No piece of installed software can do that.

By the way, if your blog isn't listed in the RSS feeds, it's probably because you don't have an RSS feed set up!

Digg Dugg, Part Deux

When I went to bed last night, Digg was in a state of lockdown - stories being deleted and users being banned. I woke up this morning none the wiser, and was planning on talking about Digg's reaction for a bit.

But then, around 9PM last night, Kevin Rose (Digg's owner) had a change of heart:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

And I'm not really sure what to make of this. It still may be too early for proper analysis, so bear with me if I 180 on this in a couple of days.

Last night, I blogged about the beginning of the kerfluffle, and (in my near-brain-dead state) said that Digg's users were acting like "spoiled children" and wondered if the consequence of too much information is that "that we no longer exercise discretion in the sharing of it." And I still kind of agree with that. I'll be frank: I find Digg's primary user base to be biased and narcissistic. But that is the price of an experiment like Digg, which allows anyone to vote and comment on news stories. Hell, that's the price of any democracy: that the system can and likely will be co-opted by people who are short-sighted regarding the consequences of their actions, who are obsessed with their own personal agendas, and are not necessarily thinking of the survivability of the whole.

I intended to applaud Digg's discretion at cracking down on this story, because the owners of Digg need to exercise their own self-interest (IE, the survivability of the site.) But in retrospect, I think their decision to allow the hex code to be shared is in many ways more true to the spirit of the site they founded. Rose's blog post made clear that the consequences of this action could very well be that the site gets shut down, and if Digg users still want to vote the story with the hex code up, so be it.

However.

There's the other aspect to this story - the information aspect. While Digg may be the focal point of this battle, a Google search for the key (not linked here - I refuse to be a part of this "revolt," even though I may have quietly squirreled away a copy of the key on my thumbdrive) and it returns some 36,000 hits (source: BoingBoing) - as of 9AM PST on May 2. And that number will only grow. The AACS is basically fucked here: the DeCSS DVD key shared circa 1999 was only of interest to a much smaller web-based community. Now, it's literally everywhere, and someone with a dial-up AOL account can have it in seconds (even if they wouldn't know how to put it to use.)

It's simply not possible to put the genie back in the bottle at this point. The question becomes, and it's one I've asked before, at what point does responsibility and discretion kick in?

I don't have time for a proper thought experiment on this, so I'll simply ask the question and let it percolate.