Thursday, March 12, 2009

Google Reader Adds Comments
By Tony Ruscoe

Google Reader, Google’s online feed aggregator, has finally added commenting functionality, allowing friends to discuss their shared items.

To add a comment, click the “Add Comment” link at the end of your friends’ shared items. The new “Comment View” menu item in your “Friends’ shared items” section displays all items with comments. (Note: Commenting isn’t currently available in the “All Items” views.)

Last year, Google Reader expanded its sharing capabilities so that users could add and share notes with friends. The problem being that the conversation was completely one-way. If your friend commented on an article they were sharing, you couldn’t reply to them directly.

On the same day that feature was released, Paul Buchheit announced via Twitter that FriendFeed would automatically import these notes, enabling the conversation to continue over on FriendFeed instead, so many Google Reader users have already been doing this for some time.

Since you can also add comments to all kinds of other services on FriendFeed – like RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. – I doubt users of both Google Reader and FriendFeed will benefit from this new functionality as it will fragment their conversations even more.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a good feature to have, but for FriendFeed users it’s at least 10 months too late...

[Via Official Google Reader Blog and Official Google Blog. Thanks TOMHTML!]

Google Reader Adds Commen ... by Tony Ruscoe | Comments (11)

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