Useful internet software, websites and blogsites.: Google Reader Steals the Conversation with New Commenting Feature

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Google Reader Steals the Conversation with New Commenting Feature

Sent to you by Hemi via Google Reader:

Google Reader Steals the Conversation with New Commenting Feature

via Mashable! by Adam Ostrow on 3/11/09

Google Reader is getting more social this evening, with the addition of comments to your friends' shared items. To get to the feature, you first need to drill down to your Friends' Shared Items, then click "Comment View." From there, you'll be able to add comments to any of your friends' shared items, and also see which of your friends have recently commented on stuff.

This feature has some interesting implications for bloggers and aggregators like FriendFeed. Since Google Reader displays the full-text of RSS feeds, the "Comments" feature essentially acts much like the comments on blogs and provides a disincentive to actually visit the website to leave your comments. On the other hand, it is friends-only, creating what Google is calling in effect a "private conversation" that might be different from what you see on publicly visible blog comments.

That said, Comments aren't exportable at this time, meaning they won't show up on services like FriendFeed, where Google Reader shared items are visible as just a headline, and a Note if the user has chosen to include one. Often, this leads to lots of conversation around the items, but it seems like part of that conversation could now stay within Google Reader.

For now, the implementation is a bit awkward. For example, you can't comment on stories from the "All Items" view, which includes selected friends' shared items in addition to the feeds you subscribe to, and is where I spend most of my time in Google Reader. However, Google says they have "much more planned for this feature," meaning we could see comments show up in lots more places soon.

It'll be interesting to see the reaction to this from bloggers. Hopefully Google decides to make comments exportable, so we can include them in the commenting section of blogs, the way we currently do here on Mashable with our "social media comments" feature.

We'd love to know what you think about this feature. Let us know your thoughts in our comment area