Google Reader Sharing: Getting Social Scale Wrong

Google’s Chrix Finne (love the name!) posted about Google’s attempts to correct the social scale glitch inherent in their new Sharing capabilities:

We’ve gotten a lot of helpful feedback about our new sharing feature. We’d hoped that making it easier to share with the people you chat with often would be useful and interesting, but we underestimated the number of users who were using the Share button to send stories to a limited number of people. We’re looking at ways to make sharing more granular and flexible, but in the meantime there are several ways to share items without letting all of your Google Talk friends see them (you can also add or remove friends via Gmail or Google Talk).

The combination of Gtalk friends and the ‘share’ capability led to people actually sharing stuff with their Gtalk contacts. But prior to the inclusion of Gtalk buddies, people used the share mechanism as a ‘star’ replacement, never expecting people to find the URL. A lot of people have guffawed about this, like Paul Kedrotsky:

Paul Kedrosky: Google, Security by Obscurity, etc..

It was just a dopey feature, poorly implemented, and badly documented. In other words, it was normal software. And when Google finally, you know, made the Sharing feature share things — it linked your sharing feed to your address book — people got all pissy because a feature created to drive blind sharing of content with relative strangers began making it easier to blindly share content with relative strangers.

But the real issue is Google not understanding social scale. All people in my Gtalk list are not equal. I don’t necessarily want to share everything with everybody. What is really necessary is a way to segment the contacts or the items to be shared or — best of all — both.

Their suggestion is to share items based on tags, rather than the items themselves: each tag or starred item will get it’s own page and URL.

I think this is coming at things the wrong way. It’s not the items, it’s the buddies.

My recommendation: allow us to tag our contacts, as a means to controlling things short of making them fully public. If I tag Euan with ‘social tools’ I am implying that any Reader item tagged ‘social tools’ should be shared with him. And you don’t have to make the pages public: you could require folks to login to see shared items that are not fully public. If I tag something ‘secret’ and have tagged no one ‘secret’, then no one would see it. Of course, I could choose to make ‘social tools’ fully public, but that is an escape from social scale.

As David Weinberger once commented, “every tag implies a community” — meaning a community of people sharing the use of the tag. For Google Reader to start to have more of a community feel, the Googleites need to consider shared space: not just this sharing on a node by node basis. Tags could open that up, just as the Technorati folks have tried to do, based on authors tagging their own work. However, readers tagging is likely to be just as interesting. And, oh, Google could also pull the tags from the posts, if they wanted.

This is an example where simply merging capabilities from formerly unintegrated services leads to unintended consequences. Google should think long and hard about Reader, Blog Search, and GTalk integration, and do something big instead of blundering into this sort of kerfuffle.