Freelance Web Design & Development

So, I don’t actually use an RSS reader to read anything (though for years I keep saying that I’ll start subscribing to the sites I read — I always eventually conclude that it would cramp my procrastination style, which is heavily dependent on “oh yeah I forgot about this site! let me read two months of its archives now”). But, I’ve recently discovered Google Reader’s cool property — my friends (and of COURSE Google knows who my friends are — through GChat) “share” things on GReader, and I can easily view a list of things they’ve shared recently/since I last looked. Neat! A casual way for friends to point each other at websites, without the commitment of email or blogging!

Except it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t exactly what it is. A few days ago, I wanted to share a page I’d seen with friends, but because it’s not part of a feed I couldn’t share it through GReader — I had to either post it on a blog or LJ, or email it (which is what I did, but that required a more deliberate recipient selection than I’d been going for). Today, I was skimming things my friends had shared on GReader, and I found myself wanting to comment to the people who had shared things, about the fact that that person had shared that item. But there’s no way to do that. OK, I could send an email about that, too — but I thought the whole point of this Web 2.0 business was to facilitate this type of casual communication that’s not just on but also about the internet. Everything has comment functionality! Everything has “share this webpage” functionality!

So… if anyone has any ideas how I might hack GReader to work this way, or any other services I might try that are more like what I’m going for, you can let me know… in a comment on this blog post.