Ok, Scoble agrees with me (or I agree with him) that Google Reader needs GPC and calls the Google Reader team "idiots". 

"… 2. I could call the Google Reader team idiots for not putting GPC into its social networking and sharing features."

"…I’m going to take #2: that the Google Reader team screwed up here and needs to implement GPC as soon as possible. What’s GPC? Granular Privacy Controls.

Here’s how Google screwed up: Google didn’t understand that some users thought that their shared items feeds were private and didn’t know that they were going to be turned totally public. The users who are complaining about this feature assumed that since their feed had a weird URL (here’s mine so you can see that the URL isn’t easy to figure out the way other URLs are) that their feed couldn’t be found by search engines or by people who they didn’t explicitly give the URL to, etc. In other words, that their feed and page would, really, be private, even though it was shared in a public way without a password required or anything like that.

Now, I almost took the stance that the users are wrong. Except, well, in this case they aren’t and the Google Reader team should change the way this feature works."

 

 

Is Google Reader sharing too much information – giving away the store, so to speak?

Yes.

According to a post in TechCrunch today:

"…The problem is that sharing is an all-or-nothing proposition. You either share posts with all of your contacts (who also use Google Reader) or with nobody. In other words, sharing is the same as making your selections public. There is no way to pick and choose with whom exactly you want to share particular posts or feeds. Without giving consumers that granular control, the sharing feature is in danger of becoming a spamming feature. Just because I’ve sent you an e-mail in the past does not make us friends, and it certainly does not mean that you want to keep track of every random blog post I decide to share.  "

 

I'm pretty clear that what I'm sharing is information that I found interesting – but look what someone else, highly placed, choose to share?

What's more embarrassing is this person, well known in the Web Analytics field, didn't share anything else – just those three items.

Here's proof that Google Reader is providing too much information with no granular control of who sees it.

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.