- 78% said no

– 11% said Yes

– 12% said "I’m not sure."

This is just my own speculation, but I feel like there are still a lot of people who just don’t really understand what RSS feeds are, and how readers can make their lives easier in terms of reading content. On the other hand, there are probably many who use RSS and don’t even realize it. Like Mark Hopkins at Mashable says, "You can’t ask mainstream users whether or not they use RSS in their daily course of Internet usage any more than you can ask the average couch potato whether or not they use Cathode Ray Tubes or Liquid Crystal Displays."

A couple months ago Google announced some new features for Blogger that would be rolling out, including a "Follow this blog" feature, which would provide a call-to-action to readers, and theoretically drive them to Google Reader, at which point they would become familiar with RSS feeds almost by accident. In time, this could still prove to be a driving factor for feed adoption, but there are other similar technologies out there that people are already using even if they don’t realize it. Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion, who considers himself an "RSS evangelist" had this to say about it:

Still, while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehicles that bring content you care about to you. In each case, you’re total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you.

RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.

There is no doubt that feeds can have numerous benefits from a business standpoint, and can simply provide both a time-saving option for reading content as well as a portal to consuming massive amounts of knowledge in a short amount of time. I’ve always envisioned feeds as the news source of the future. Personally, I turn to them rather than the newspaper with my morning coffee. It’s all about the personalization of the news you are reading. You select your sources. It’s like having a thousand (the number is up to you) newspaper subscriptions, only they are all organized by article the way you want them to be for easy perusal, and you can easily read the ones that catch your interest, but the fact that you can subscribe to as many niche sites/blogs as you want ensures that you are getting the kind of news that you are in fact interested in (as soon as it is published no less). If more people came to this realization, I feel like adoption would increase. What do you think?

obstinate - ADJECTIVE: 1. Stubbornly adhering to an attitude, opinion, or course of action; obdurate.

Earlier in December, Google Reader began exposing one’s shared items with contacts in Gmail or Google Talk. One chat with a contact meant they could see shared newsfeed items, whether or not the Google Reader user wanted to share with that particular person.

Google’s defense has been one of blinking astonishment. Shared items are public anyway, so what’s the big deal?

The “big deal” is that the shared page does not have an easily guessable URL. The URL ends with a string of 20 numbers. The typical person isn’t going to pull that string out of thin air, append it to Google.com/reader/shared, and see what’s on the page.

Chrix Finne posted a response to the sometimes-heated online discussion of the sharing feature at the Google Reader blog. It’s the same advice as before: manage sharing by tags in Reader; clear out all the stuff people may have seen already by virtue of being eligible to view those items; or punt your friends from your contact list.

The needed fix, which Finne hinted at in saying, “We’re looking at ways to make sharing more granular and flexible,” is precisely that. Just because someone had a chat with a contact one time doesn’t mean the person wants that contact to see shared items if and when he starts using Google Reader.

This analogy may help. Say you work in an office building, in one of several smaller offices. You and your office mates decide to have a potluck and post a signup sheet within your office.

That’s how the shared items page works. Yes, it’s public, but no one is going out of the way to run across the building to a person they chatted with one time for some purely business-related reason and say “look we’re having a potluck on Friday.” This is what Reader’s sharing policy does.

We would like Google to permit sharing with contacts on an opt-in basis per contact, not an opt-out. People who have expressed a negative opinion of the new sharing policy could live with that, as it does not drop a burden of managing opt-outs on them.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/google-acknowledges-reader-sharing-complaints-2007-12/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/google-reader-shows-up-with-search-2007-09 http://www.webpronews.com/google-reader-shows-up-with-search-2007-09#comments Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:57:50 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40228 File this under: “What took so long?” Google’s online feedreader now has a search box for doing queries within a person’s subscribed feeds.

The usefulness of effective search vaulted Google from garage project to multi-billion dollar powerhouse. That search has been a glaring omission from Google’s otherwise excellent newsfeed organizer, Google Reader.

That has changed as a shiny new search box appeared atop the Google Reader page. The Google Reader blog declared, “That’s right, search is finally in Google Reader.”

People can search across all of their feeds, including shared items they have subscribed to from their friends’ feeds. The default function searches all feeds, but a dropdown choice allows for searches to be limited to shared or starred items, or just a specific feed.

The team made some other updates to Reader as well:

Along for the ride in the search release are a few other Reader tweaks. You can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. Unread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. Finally, Reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to.

We do have one complaint about the addition of the search box to Google Reader. It has killed the ability to use Reader in the Opera browser, as several people have already pointed out on the product’s support group.