Google

So now that Google Reader has the notes feature, allowing me to make little comments on everything I share, and the ability to share anything I browse to, I want to be able to use it to replace del.icio.us in my blog workflow.

At the moment, I use del.icio.us to create those “links for…” posts. Del.icio.us does this automatically - and what I want is for Google Reader to do the same job. Does anyone know how or even if this can be done?

My blog friend Mathew Ingram has a post up on the new features in Google Reader, which provide the ability to add comments to items you share, and share any items via a bookmarklet. Mathew thinks the features are “kind of lame”, particularly when compared to FriendFeed. However, I think that Mathew is missing a few things.

The thing about FriendFeed is that it’s incredibly Twitter-centric, and provides something that Twitter readers have been complaining about virtually since the services was born: a threaded comment view. This means that it turns Twitter into a pretty decent discussion system, something that it sucks at at the moment. This is why it’s become popular with Twitter users - it meets a need that Twitter itself has steadfastly refused to meet.

But comparing it to Google Reader is a pointless exercise, because the two products are designed to do very different things. Google Reader allows you pretty good granular control over anything that comes in RSS form, and allows you to sort and categorise information whichever way you want. The folder structure means that, for example, I can concentrate on my work-related feeds when at work, and save reading friends till later.

FriendFeed gives you a “river of news” view with locked-in comments (although, to be fair, they seem to want to open that out - hence the ability to post back to Twitter, and, forthcoming, the ability to post back to Disqus). The only granularity you have is to click on the feed source - you can’t tag or categorise feeds effectively.

Does that matter? For people wanting “Twitter Pro”, the answer is no. FriendFeed provides proper discussions for Twitter in a much more useable way than anything else. But that doesn’t make FriendFeed a good RSS reader, unless all you want is a single stream of news/noise. Of course, that’s exactly what Dave Winer has been arguing for for ages, with Scoble agreeing, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Scoble has been a big FriendFeed champion.

It’s also worth noting something that I think a lot of people have forgotten: Google already owns a service which does everything that FriendFeed does, and much more. It’s called Jaiku, and I expect that Google will be starting to make something more of it in the not-too-distant future.

1. Yes, it really is “Google Acquisition Engine“. Of course, using it is also a cert guarantee that Yahoo, Microsoft, and everyone else won’t buy you - unless they’re already a Google partner.

2. I am very glad that Jaiku is moving to this platform. Now, suddenly, the effective radio silence that Jaiku has undergone makes a lot of sense.

Bringing the cloud with you:

“We know that many of you have been waiting for offline access to Google Docs, and I’m happy to tell you we’ll be rolling it out over the next few weeks, starting today with a small percentage of users.”

(Via Official Google Docs Blog.)

I’m very much hoping that the announcement of a mobile version of Google Gears presages both a version for Safari on the Mac, and something for Safari on the iPhone, too.