Google Reader Exploit

I’m listening to Steve Gillmor’s News Gang from March 13th and a large part of what they are talking about is one of Steve’s recent hot button issues. He calls it the “Google Reader Shared Items exploit”. Basically, when you use Google Reader and you share items, they can be seen by your “friends” in a list of “your friends shared items.” Steve has a problem with the very loose methodology Google uses to determine who is a friend, which is inferred algorithmically and not anything you can do explicitly. He and Mary Hodder seem to be worked up about it and Chris Saad doesn’t think it is a big deal. I’m with you, Chris Saad. I sure don’t understand the problem when you take an item from your feed and mark it “Shared” that it gets shared with arbitrary people. It seem reasonable to me that doing so shares to a group that might be up to as big as the internet. I mean, I have the dang widget sitting in my sidebar. For those people who have an issue with it, what I wonder is who they think they are sharing with and what they thought would happen when they hit that check box?

This does not mean that I endorse Google data policies broadly. They kind of scare the hell out of me. I spent years of not logging in to Google for any reason because I was worried they would track my searches. Once I started using Reader and staying logged in all day I bought a few shares of stock. My rationale was that if I can’t tame the tiger, maybe I can at least ride it a little.

Update: I’m pretty sure now that Steve Gillmor is wrong about how friends are inferred. I have heard him say that it comes from emailing people but I pulled up the Settings -> Friends page and set it beside my list of GTalk friends and every single person on my Reader friends list was a GTalk buddy. In other words, I think you have to take the explicit action of making them an IM buddy before you see their shared items. That doesn’t change my initial post, in that sharing is sharing and if you don’t want to broadcast your interest in a topic you probably ought not to be sharing it.

Google Reader Link Blog

Operational question here: when I read news with Google Reader, I star some things and I share some things. Often they are the same things, but not always. To me, the star means “This needs more attention later”, kind of like a “Next Action” in the GTD sense. Share put is in the public link blog. If I come back to one of these things and I subsequently blog it, I unstar it. Should I also “unshare” at that point or just leave everything always in there? I don’t have a real feel for what is useful to the people that might use this.

Google Reader Shared Links

So does anyone care about my Google Reader shared links? I like having that little doojig in the sidebar, but I don’t know if anyone else actually cares. It does a pretty decent job of giving insight into what type of things are on my mind at the time. I’m liking Google Reader so far. I haven’t fired up NetNewsWire since I started using it.