Month: December 2007

Everybody knows everybody. Almost.

Social Times report:

One really sweet feature that has been added to this LinkedIn update is via a partnership with Business Week. While reading articles on their site, you can see how you are connected through LinkedIn to the companies and individuals mentioned in each article. That definitely makes the news much more personal.

That definitely makes the news much more personal.  That definitely shows how small (and flat?) the world is becoming…

Google Profile coming up

In my recent post about Google Reader and Google Talk integration I mentioned that it would be nice to have a possibility to control friends’ names and pictures.  Similar to the way I can do so in Gmail.  Having things a bit more centralized would be nice.

Obviously, Google realizes that.  They are some of the smartest people put together after all. Well, it looks like we’ll have something centralized in the near future.  Web Worker Daily runs a post about Google Profile.  Good news.

And while I was going through that stuff, I had a thought (yes, again).  Google must have some really nice tools for its developers. Usually, companies try to maximize the utilization of available resources, boost code reuse, and minimize time spent on re-implementing things.  Google shown a few decentralized bits over time.  Like this contact management issue, for example.  That probably means that creating something like Google Profile (simple, but very scalable application) has been made extremely easy.  It’s like it is easy to make one rather than to decide if one is really needed and what are the alternatives and how to use those alternatives. That, or they have some a weak approach to code reuse – something that I find hard to believe.  Either way, it’s interesting…

Passing forward with Google Reader

One of the cool things that can be done with the Google Reader (now that it integrates with Gtalk contacts), is proxying of items from one set of people to another via a common connection.  Consider, for example, my contact list with Person A and Person B, both of who don’t know each other, but share a common interest.  Person A is subscribed to Mega Feed RSS, which neither me, nor Person B is subscribed to.  One day there is a really cool post in the Mega Feed RSS, which Person A markes as “shared”.  Since Person A is in my contact list and I decided to see his shared items too, that item will popup in my Google Reader.  I’ll read it, and then decide that it is indeed a great post which some of my other contacts might be interested in.  Instead of annoying them all with an email, I’ll just mark it as “Shared” in my Google Reader, and this item will appear in Person B’s items from friends.

Here are the nice parts of the above process:

  • One news channel for everything – your news, and news from your friends.  No mixing of RSS items with emails and IMs.
  • No data duplication.  We don’t copy-paste and send the item over and over again.  Instead, we just share the same piece of data.
  • Control of the incoming streams in user hands.  If you don’t like the items someone is sharing, just “hide” the user via “Settings”.  Nobody is annoying anybody.
  • People in your contact list help you find the sources and content that you might be interested in.

Google Reader and Google Talk integrated. Sort of.

Google Reader has been recently integrated with Google Talk.  Somewhat.  If you use Google Reader and Google Talk, and you have some buddies in your Google Talk contact list, who also use Google Reader, then from now on you will be able to see each other’s shared items.  Through the “Settings“, you can control who you want and don’t want to see in the “Friends’ shared items“.

This is a really nice piece of functionality.  First of all, it saves you all the effort of finding and subscribing to “Shared items” RSS feeds of all your friends one by one.   Secondly, it helps to highlight interesting stuff from your buddies, even those that you might accidentally omitted from your subscriptions.

So, what am I missing there?  Two things.

First, the option to rename buddies.  I am blessed with contacts who choose all sorts of nicknames and avatars.  I prefer real names.  And I attach real face pictures to all my contacts whenever I can.  And I’ve done it in my Gmail contacts.  That information should be used for the Google Reader friends list.

Secondly, I need an option to enter a discussion with my friends regarding an item in my Google Reader.  That can be something I have shared, or that can be something my friends shared.  I want a “discuss in chat” and “discuss in email” buttons.  “Discuss in email” should be, in this case, different from “Email this item”.  We both (me, and the friend with who I’m entering a discussion) have read the item.  We just need a reference, like a subject, and URL to the item (original article?), just in case we need to run through it again or quote something.

While the second point is harder to implement (requires user studies, interface cluttering, etc), I’m really surprised that the first one wasn’t done.