Google

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.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Sneaking behind IT’s back:

“By easing the grassroots adoption of Apps, Google hopes to begin reshaping the way employees - and then employers - think about personal productivity apps. The idea isn’t to displace, say, Microsoft Office, but to complement it, providing a simple way to collaborate on documents and other files. As the use of Apps becomes more established, it becomes natural for companies to formally adopt the programs to gain further capabilities and controls. In the process, they’ll probably also sign up for the premium edition, which requires a $50 per user subscription. And then, in the long run, people start realizing that they’re doing pretty much everything they need to do within the web apps, and they start asking themselves: why exactly are we still licensing the old-fashioned versions of these programs and suffering the expense and nuisance of installing and running them on all our PCs?

And then the bottom-up revolution is complete. Or so Google hopes - and Microsoft fears.”

Just as IM sneaked in to the work place, was initially resisted, and then welcomed, so will Google Docs be.

Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information:

“We’re really excited to bring you forms! Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you’ll get the spreadsheet automatically.

Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet. You can even keep a closer eye on them by adding the Google Docs forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage, created by software engineers Valerie Blechar and Sarah Beth Eisinger (in her first month at Google!). It lists your recent active forms, with new responses highlighted. Add this gadget to your iGoogle page:”

(Via Official Google Docs Blog.)

The possibilities for this are actually pretty much endless - it’s an amazing little feature.