shareditems – Climb to the Stars

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.

[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.