I noticed it too .... tonight - and wondered ... was it there all the time and I just missed it? Nope - according to Steve Rubel in Reader Integrates Google's Stealth Social Net: The Address Book
I started seeing a few posts from some of my contacts from blogs that are not in my Google Reader feeds that I'm tracking. So what does it mean?
"....This change is small, but significant. It's indicative of how Google (wisely) plans to attack social networking. It is tapping into the Gmail address book and using it to transform all of its static services into on-the-fly communities. Factor in OpenSocial and you can see the beginnings of something big.
Social networking isn't just about a few standalone sites but a bunch of different address books that actually make the entire web more social."
If anything, it's going to get me to subscribe to more feeds - since I might find some posts that are marked by my contacts that are interesting to me, but from a blog I never read.
I'm not really sure what else this does for me (yet) ... maybe it gives me some insight on what my contacts find interesting - when they get around to sharing something. Rubel seems to think that posts being shared by my Gmail contacts is the beginning of something big - but I'm not seeing what the "big" thing he's referring to is going to be.
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