Google Reader Improves Friends Sharing Feature

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.