googlereader – Climb to the Stars

Netvibes Widget of my Shared Items [en]

If you read this blog “on the blog”, and look at my very cluttered sidebar, you probably noticed there is a feed of my “shared items” from Google Reader hidden in there (grab the feed!). “Sharing” is the reason I switched to Google Reader over a year ago.

I’m sitting in a workshop about UWA widgets at Paris Web, which had me looking at netvibes again. Even though it never clicked for me, I know lots of you use it (I check my stats, yes I do).

So, here we go. One thing leading to another, I created a widget with my shared items in it. It’s more for fun than because it’s really useful, as you netvibes users can create it really easily — but hey, here it is:

Update: how disappointing! I thought it was going to look like this in the blog post:

Not there yet, it seems.

Update 2: something I’ve been wanting to do with netvibes (not sure how feasible it is, actually): create a tab with “my stuff” in it. See, I’m scattered online. And the stuff I “share” is also scattered. If I found it through my feed reader, it’ll appear as a whole post in my shared items. If I was randomly browsing around, it’ll be in my del.icio.us links. If it was a video I watched on YouTube, it’ll end up in my VLog. If I wanted to share a quote, it’ll be in my Tumblr. Creating something to collect all these “things of others that I consider worth passing on” would be really nice. I wonder if a netvibes tab would be a solution — and if people would use it at all.

Google Shared Stuff: First Impressions [en]

[fr] Google Shared Stuff, nouveau venu dans l'arène du social bookmarking. Pas convaincue qu'ils aient pour le moment quelque chose de plus à apporter que leurs concurrents déjà bien établis.

I’ve briefly tried Google Shared Stuff, and here are my first impressions. I’m one of those horrible people who always see what the problems are instead of what’s good, so I’ll just say as a preamble to the few gripes I’m raising here that overall, it looks neat, shiny, and it works roughly as it should.

Profile Photo

nice: I can choose photos from various sources
not so nice: “The photo you specify here will be used across all Google products and services which display your public photo, including Google Talk and Gmail.”

I already have a photo in my Gmail/Google Talk profile. Why can’t you use it? If I upload a photo here, is it going to overwrite it? Need more info, folks.

Private vs. Public

This is my shared stuff:

Shared stuff can be public or private. Above is the page as I, the account owner see it. Below is the page that the public sees:

See the missing link? (Not difficult, there are only two in total.) “Hah, you’ll say, you made the second link private! That’s why the public can’t see it!” Try again:

The link was shared as “public”. This is obviously broken in some way, folks. Please fix it.

Email/Share Bookmarklet

The bookmarklet is nice, but nothing revolutionary:

What about the sharing pane? It looks very much like the del.icio.us sharing pane, but more cluttered. The nice thing is that it lets you choose a photo to illustrate your share (like FaceBook does, for example):

Besides being less cluttered, the del.icio.us pane has a huge advantage over the Google one: it’s a resizable window. Really really appreciated when a link you clicked (or a page opened by Skitch) uses that window for the new tab.

One interesting feature of this sharing pane is that it allows you to share to other social bookmarking services — not just Google’s. That’s nice. Open. No lock-in. But… isn’t it a bit pointless when I can access the del.icio.us bookmarking pane in just one click instead of three?

What I Wish For

One-Click

I’d like a one-click bookmarklet which works exactly like the “Share” button in Google Reader:

Clicking the “Share” button adds the post to the stream of my Shared Items page/feed. Painless. I can easily add them to my sidebar:

However, now that I’m using the Google Reader “Next” bookmarklet more, I find that I’m in Google Reader less, so something like a “Share Bookmarklet” (Google Reader-style) would come in really handy.

The main point here is that to share something in Google Reader, I click once. With Shared Stuff or del.icio.us, I click at least twice.

Holes in Buckets!

So here we are. Again. Make all this stuff communicate, will ya? When I share stuff in Google Reader, I’d love it to be pushed to my del.icio.us account automatically, with a preset tag or tags (“shareditem” for example). It annoys me to have links I’ve saved in del.icio.us and in Shared Items (Google Reader). It’s not as bad as it was when you couldn’t search Google Reader, but still.

Am I going to add yet another list of “shared stuff” to my online ecosystem? That’s the question. Make that bookmarklet share to Google Reader Shared Items, and let me push all that to del.icio.us, and you’ll really have something that adds value for me.

Otherwise, I’m not sure where Shared Stuff will fit in my social bookmarking life.

The Aggregator Lag [en]

[fr] A cause de Google Reader qui m'a servie une version "non rectifiée" de ce billet de danah, j'ai failli contribuer à propager des informations fausses, et ça m'énerve. Ça m'énerve surtout quand (en l'occurence) la technologie vient nous mettre des bâtons dans les roues.

This bugs me. It bugs me because it’s a situation where the technology which is normally supposed to assist us in communicating actually gets in the way of good communication. It’s even worse, actually: here, a technological issue could invite us to spread false information.

(Of course, there is a human issue behind this, but it’s not what I want to address here. Humans can make mistakes, and as long as they are honestly made, I think we should just accept that they happen.)

I just read danah’s last post in Google Reader and headed to the Facebook group she was pointing to so I could get a little more information on the current situation.

There, I found a message which indicated that FaceBook had never sent the ArabLGTB group the message they had received. It was, in fact, a fake.

Well, I thought I’d better comment about that on danah’s post, so I headed over to her blog. There, to my surprise (happy surprise), I saw she had already updated her post.

The update just hadn’t made it to Google Reader.

So of course, there is nothing extraordinary going on here. This story is just another case of misinformation spread by good intentions (and I’m thinking mainly about all the people who blogged about this on their LiveJournals and will never know it was not true — or bother finding out). But I’m annoyed that I almost got caught in it too, and that I always forget that we can’t trust aggregators to serve us the latest version of a post.

Check, check, check. When in doubt, don’t blog. (That’s for me.)

Geeky Frustrations [en]

[fr] Quelques râlages (comme quoi je ne fais pas ça qu'en français) au sujet de certains outils que j'utilise quotidiennement.

Right, so, just so I can get it off my chest, here is a list of little things that bug me with the tools I use daily. If I save them for a “proper write-up” they probably will never be posted, so… here goes.

Twitter: let me see a differential list of those I follow and those who follow me, both ways. I need to know who is following me that I’m not following (maybe I missed somebody out) and who I’m following but they’re not (to keep in mind they won’t see stuff I twitter).
Twitter: let me tag my friends, or sort them into buddy groups. Then let me activate phone alerts for only certain groups. One-by-one management is just impossible with 100 or so friends.
Adium: let me turn off Gmail notifications. I have Google Notifier for that. I hate having to click “OK” on that window all the time.
Google Reader: let me drag’n drop feeds from one folder to another.
Facebook: let me import more than one RSS feed in my notes.
Nokia 6280 and Macbook: please sync with each other each time I ask you to, not once out of three.
Nokia 6280: gimme a “mark all as read” option for my text messages, please!
Nokia 6280: I’d say something about the really crappy camera, but there isn’t much you can do about it now, can you.
iPod: let me loop through all episodes of a podcast instead of having to go to the next episode manually.
iTunes: let me mix playlists as a source for Party Shuffle (30% My Favorites, 30% Not Listened in Last week, 40% Artist I’m Obsessing Over These Days… for example)
Google Reader and del.icio.us: find a way to allow me to automatically post Shared Items to del.icio.us too.
Flickr: let me link to “My Favorite photos tagged …” so I can show my readers what I’ve found.
Added 18.02.07 0:10 Google Ajax-y Homepage: let me Share Google Reader items, not just star them.
…

Certainly more, but these were those which were bugging me badly just now. Well, they’re off my chest, now I can go back to fretting about all the stuff I need to get rid of in my flat and which is still lying around because I haven’t quite figured out the optimal way to dispose of it.

Google Reader: I'm Officially Pissed Off [en]

[fr] Trouvé la source des pubs pop-up: les extraits de ma page de "diffusion de billets" Google Reader. Je suppose qu'il y a des trous et que les pubs s'y glissent.

Update 28.10.06: Fixed.

First, excuse the strong language. Second, note that I’ve removed my latest shared items from the sidebar.

Why did I do such a thing, if I love the sharing feature of Google Reader so much?

I did it because I finally identified the culprit in the mystery of the pop-up ads on CTTS. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen: the little piece of code I had added to display the headlines of my latest shared posts.

Now, I suspect this isn’t something Google did by design. I mean, I don’t suspect Google of wanting to display pop-up ads on any page which uses this kind of “clip” (that’s what they call it). However, I do suspect that there is a hole in their code somewhere that allows ads to creep in.

Google Reader people: this would probably be worth fixing.

Thanks again to LLoyd who drew my attention to the pop-up and Chris who assisted me in narrowing down the problem.

Google Reader Share Limitations [en]

[fr] J'ai peur que mon amour pour la fonction "share" de Google Reader ne soit en train d'appauvrir l'ajout de liens à mon compte del.icio.us.

I told you I liked the sharing feature of Google Reader. After a week or so using it, I worry that I’m “sharing” stuff instead of putting it in del.icio.us. It’s not a problem per se, but it is because I can’t search my shared items.

Wishlist: I’d love a “del.icio.us” button next to the “share” one in gReader. Of course, I’m dreaming, as del.icio.us is Yahoo.

Edit: by the way, thanks to the people who use the add to del.icio.us feedflare to help me add their posts to del.icio.us. It’s really useful.

I Might Be Switching to Google Reader [en]

[fr] J'aime Google Reader comme lecteur RSS. Surtout la facilité avec laquelle on peut partager des billets qui nous ont plu.

Robert loves Google Reader. Tempted me to try. I think I love it too.

I’ve been using Bloglines for quite some time now (still doesn’t make me a good blog reader). I find the interface for Google Reader clearer. It was easy to export my subscriptions as OPML from Bloglines to try Google Reader.

What really wins me over? How easy it is to share the stuff I’ve liked with you. I’ve even added it to my sidebar. See? Maybe Bloglines does it (I’m sure it does) but it wasn’t obvious enough and I never got around to doing it. With Google Reader, I just click on the “share” button at the end of each post I want to add to my share page.