Google Reader Improves Friends Sharing Feature

Aug 14, 2008 at 9:35am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Reader Blog announced they have added a few features to improve the flexibility of sharing your feeds with your friends. With the new feature, you can now manage your “Friends list” in Google Reader, separate from your Gmail chat contacts.

Why is that important? Well, when Google Reader first released friend share items, all your Gmail contacts saw all your shared feeds. So there were privacy concerns over such a feature, where Danny even called for Google to drop the feature completely until they came out with a more flexible solution.

Well, Google did not drop the feature, but they did launch this new, more flexible friend sharing feature, which should address many of the privacy concerns. It only took eight months to happen.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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