David Carrington

Bryan Person heard about it from Marketing Over Coffee and thinks it’s a good idea, as do his two commenters. Bill Deys wrote about it too.

Scoble refuses to not do it:

“My link blog is for keeping what I think are the most important RSS items of the day, including mine.”

The positive side of doing it is that you’re potentially pushing your blog into more people’s RSS readers. The only negative feedback I’ve read so far consists of one of these two arguments:

• Duplicates - This is reasonable, hopefully Google Reader is now smart enough not to show an item twice. If not, it’s probably something they’re trying to do.
• “I don’t like your blog” - People saying this have a fair point. For now, their only choice is to put up with it or unsubscribe.

I’m personally going to add this to my own Shared Items (david.carrington AT gmail DOT com if that helps).

I’ve used Google Reader for ages, and I’ve been using GTalk with Nick for ages. Annoyingly, Reader flat-out refuses to let me add Nick as a friend to see his shared items in the new interface.

Since then, I’ve managed to add Scoble and Chris F. Masse, but still no Nick! Does Google not like him? Has he offended somebody?

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

1. Removing him from GTalk and re-adding
2. Deleting the whole GMail contact and re-adding

What can I try next?

Google Reader has become slightly more social lately with the addition of recommended feeds. I’ve just come across another tweak to the interface which helps a bit with the social aspect: a Shared Items improvement.

The screenshot above shows that not only did Scoble share the feed item in question, but my colleague Nick Clarke also shared it. Previously, this would have come up as two items for me to read, once in Nick’s shared items feed and again in Scoble’s feed.

This is a slight step forward to the point where items with more “shares” are promoted for reading. I don’t think there’s a current interface to accomplish this though.

Google Blog is covering Gmail’s latest new feature: AIM support. Has anyone else noticed that this isn’t new at all? I’ve been using Gmail (or more specifically, GTalk) for ICQ and MSN since January 2006. I don’t have any need for AIM, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t add that too.

I’ve already got Gmail storing my MSN logs, my ICQ logs, and everything else. Pretty much all Google have accomplished here is to a) sign a deal with AOL to create an official Jabber transport for AIM, and b) change the Gmail interface slightly.

I’m not all negative though! With Google comes stability. I’ve had to switch Jabber transports quite a few times for MSN, since I’ve had trouble finding stable servers. I’d really appreciate if Google could create a stable transport for MSN and offer that out in the same way.