Google

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.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.