The deficiencies of Google Reader as a sharing platform

Google Reader is a fantastic app. It is the perfect way to wrangle all those cool web sites your following into one easy location. I am able to take in far more information much more quickly and efficiently than I could by visiting each individual site. Google Reader also offers a sharing feature that allows user to easily broadcast their favorite items to other Reader users in their Gmail contacts list. Recently, Google added the ability to provide notes making the sharing even more robust. However, I now find myself re-sharing friends items with replies to their notes or my own notes or even e-mailing them a story they originally shared to give my two cents. As is the way of the web, there is a better way to carry on a conversation surrounding web content… and you don’t even have to ditch Google Reader to get there!

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Meta: New comments system!

I am auditioning a new comment system for the blog. It adds a really cool social aspect to the comments along with a feature that should have been included with WordPress from the beginning: comment threading! We’ll see how it works over the next few days. It may make things look a little strange. As yet, there is no way to migrate existing comments. Rather than lose them, I kept the old comment system on those pages with comments. Other pages will employ the new system. The comment count (next to the story title) is also different from old to new which will cause the homepage to look a little touched until all the stories there are using the new system. I hope it’s worth the minor issues. Let me know what you think.