sharing – Climb to the Stars

Facebook: Sharing or Showing Off? [en]

[fr] Une prise de conscience d'une part de l'effet négatif que peuvent avoir sur moi les publications positives de mes amis sur Facebook (je suis contente pour eux, mais en comparaison, suivant mon humeur, ça peut faire ressortir à mes yeux mon inadéquation), et d'autre part du fait que je contribue peut-être à cet effet chez les autres avec mes partages (de tout mon temps passé au chalet dans un cadre magnifique, mes voyages, la voile...).

A few months ago, I realised that certain posts that showed up in my timeline on Facebook didn’t make me feel very good.

another of my friends was writing a book
somebody else was hanging out with exciting “famous” people
yet another was pregnant
somebody had a new exciting professional gig

I felt happy for all these people, of course. Amongst my peers, I’ve been reasonably conservative about connecting with people on Facebook, and bar a few exceptions (that’s life), I’ve only friended people I like. So, when people I like are happy, or have a new exciting job, or are about to be parents, or lead exciting lives, I’m happy for them.

But during times when I’m not feeling too good about myself or my situation, or going through a tough spot, or suffering a bout of self-doubt, learning about these good things in my friends’ lives actually brings me down.

The explanation is quite simple: social comparison. We tend to do that. Some more than others. We compare ourselves to others. It’s a background process, really, and I personally have a lot of trouble turning it off or at least down.

I’m somebody who is on the whole positive/optimistic about the internet, the digital world, social media. I think it is overall a good thing. For us as a society, and for us as people. So I’ve always looked at articles like this one with a bit of skepticism.

What I see described in some of these “facebook envy articles” doesn’t really fit with what I observe on Facebook. They sometimes paint a picture where people are actively putting their best foot forward and showing off the highlights of their lives, and others spend their time actively stalking their friends lives, seething with envy. I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea.

When I noticed that learning good news about my friends’ lives was bringing me down, it took me a while to realise I was experiencing some form of Facebook envy — because the mechanisms I could see didn’t fit with what I had been (half-heartedly) reading about.

I didn’t see my friends as bragging. They were just sharing stuff about their lives. And of course, people are more likely to share “Yay got the book deal!” than “ate a cheese sandwich for lunch”. Or maybe they also share the cheese sandwich, but more people are going to like the book deal and comment on it. And so Facebook’s algorithm is going to push it to the top and make it appear in my newsfeed, rather than the cheese sandwich.

I also didn’t see myself as actively trying to compare myself with others. This was just part of the “keeping passively in touch” role that Facebook plays for me. Catching up asynchronously, and probably also asymmetrically. But behind the scenes, social comparison was working overtime.

I learned to take time out. Leave Facebook for a while and go do something else. It didn’t spiral out of control. Yay me.

As I was becoming aware of what my friends’ posts was sometimes doing to me, I started having second thoughts about some of the things I was posting. You see, I have a chalet in the mountains, in a really picturesque area in the Alps. I go there quite often during winter, as I take a season ski pass. And I share photos.

What’s going on in my mind is not really “see how lucky I am”, but more “I’m aware how lucky I am and I want you to get to experience some of this too”. My intention is generous. It is to share so that others can benefit too.

But I’ve realised lately that this may not be the impact my posts have on others. My sometimes seemingly endless chalet and mountain photos might be for others what book deals and professional success in my newsfeed are to me.

People with families, or two weeks of holiday per year, or who live in parts of the world that make travel more difficult or simply don’t have the means to move from where they are might feel (rightly) envious of some aspects of my life. I travel quite a bit. Aside from the chalet, I have a boat on the lake, go to India regularly. My freelance life has drawbacks, but one of the advantages is have is that I have quite a bit of freedom with my time and where I am, as some parts of my work are location-independant. And I live in Switzerland, for heaven’s sake.

Of course, I try to share the good things about my life, because I’m aware I’m privileged, and I don’t want to spend my time whining or complaining. I do complain, but about the small things, usually. Like people saying “blog” to mean “blog post”. The big things that bring me down are also much more difficult to talk about, and so I don’t often mention them. But I’m generally happy with my life and that is what I try to express.

I don’t experience what I do on Facebook as “self-promotion”. Every now and again I “do self-promotion”. I write a post that really has to do with my professional area of expertise, or I share information about something I’m working on. But that’s far from the majority of my postings. Most of the time, it’s really just “oh, look at this, I want you to enjoy it too!”

Now, however, I’m more and more aware of the part I may be playing in fuelling other people’s social comparison blues. Am I going to post yet another photo of how beautiful the mountains are from the chalet balcony? Or showing that I’m sailing on the lake? Or that I’m hanging out with the cats again?

I don’t know if I’m going through a realisation that will change what I post about or not. But it’s definitely changing how I think and feel, to some extent.

What about you? Do you get “bad feelings” seeing what your friends are upto? And do you think about what “bad feelings” you may unwittingly be eliciting amongst your friends through your postings?

And what is the solution to this?

The Frustrating Easiness of Sharing a Link on Facebook (and Twitter and Google Plus and Tumblr and…) [en]

[fr] C'est tellement facile de partager des liens sur Facebook et autres que je finis par ne plus le faire sur mon blog, parce que c'est laborieux. Il y a un moyen plus simple?

Today, when I stumble upon an interesting link, I share it on Facebook. And usually also on Twitter. And on Google Plus.

It’s easy. More often than not, I found the link in question on Facebook, Twitter, or G+. Resharing on the same platform is two clicks maximum. The link is expanded into an excerpt and a photo which are nice and pretty and often spare me having to write any kind of introduction to the link (I do, sometimes).

Sharing on other platforms? At the worst, copy-paste (goes quickly when you use keyboard shortcuts and know your way around your browser tabs). Or the bitly bookmarklet.

Sharing on social media is rewarding: people are there already, they comment, they like, they reshare.

I pull quotes out of what I’m reading with the Tumblr bookmarklet and post them to Digital Crumble. That in turn gets sucked into Facebook, to the annoyance of some and the delight of others. Super easy.

You know what’s not easy? Collecting a bunch of interesting links I’ve found recently into a blog post on Climb to the Stars. That sucks. I’ve done it at times, yes, but I do wish there was an easier way to do it than copy-pasting article titles and putting links on them, after having let them pile up in an Evernote note until there were enough of them.

I’m sure there is a way to do this more elegantly. Tell me!

Why I End Up Sharing Without Reading [en]

[fr] Pourquoi je me retrouve parfois à partager sans lire.

A few weeks ago, I came upon an article (which I’m too tired to hunt for right now) which said that a huge number of articles shared through social media (understand: Twitter and Facebook) had not been read by those who share them.

I wasn’t surprised, because I do it regularly.

A few weeks after that, but still a few weeks ago, I shared an article I had just skimmed, and which was a pile of sh*t — and I missed that (also because it was on a topic I hadn’t done my homework on.) Thankfully I was quickly challenged by some of my followers, saw it, went back to the article, realised my mistake, removed it from my timeline (I didn’t want to spread it more), and apologised. I felt really bad.

Just like a car accident is waiting to happen if you habitually text as you drive or take other similar risks: it’s not because you manage to do it 50 times without getting into an accident that you won’t on the 51st.

Since then, I’ve been thinking really hard about this. I consider that being a reliable source is really important. I’m aware that as somebody with a bunch of followers/readers, I have a certain influence. It’s a responsibility. And I take it seriously.

So why do I end up, again and again, sharing links before I read them?

Tonight it dawned on me: it’s because of the way I browse — and maybe also because of how browsers are built.

As I scroll through my Facebook or Twitter timeline, I see article titles and summaries that look really interesting. I see who is sharing them and with what comments. Just as I am a trusted source for some, I have my trusted sources. I open said article in a new tab so that when I am in “reading mode” I can read it (and yes, I do do that). But right now I’m in browsing mode, so I continue scrolling down my timeline.

Do you see the problem, if I don’t share the interesting article right away? When I read it in a few hours or sometimes a few days, there will be no way for me to head back to the post or tweet that brought it to my attention to share it from there — and give credit to my source. So I take a small risk and share an article I know will be interesting and important, right, because I’m going to read it. (Yeah it’s faulty reasoning. But it makes sense in the moment.)

What’s missing here is a way to trace how one got to a given page, sometimes opened in a new tab. It’s even worse in mobile. Or “that page I stuck in Instapaper 5 months ago” — where did it come from?

When I’m “scanning”, I like to stay in “scanning/discovering” mode. When I’m reading, I stay in reading mode. The problem is that the “share” function is tied to the “scanning/discovering” mode. Exception: the stuff I put in Digital Crumble, which is excerpts of what I am currently reading, as I read it.

Do you sometimes share before you read? Have you tried to analyse why?

Social Tools Allow Ridiculously Easy Group-Forming [en]

More notes and related thoughts to my reading of Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody (chapter 2).

Both markets and organisations imply costs (transaction costs in large groups, labour required to maintain organisation). There are activities which simply don’t happen, because their cost is higher than their potential value both for markets and organisations. This is where social tools step in: they lower the cost of coordinating group action, and allow new forms of activities to appear.

Stuff that we find normal in 2013: if you stage a public event, photos of it will most certainly be made publicly available (through Flickr and the like) even if you do not hire a professional photographer or mandate people to collect photos. The social tool provides a cheap way for any person taking photos of the event for their personal satisfaction to add them to a public pool that anybody can draw from, through spontaneous tagging.

Under the Coasean floor: activities that are valuable to somebody but too expensive to be taken on in an institutional way, like aggregating amateur documentation of the London transit bombings. People have always had the desire to share, and the obstacles to sharing are now gone, so it happens.

When transaction costs are high, hierarchical organisations are the least bad solution for group action. If transaction costs drop a little, large organisations can afford to become larger, and small organisations appear where there were none, because they are now “cheap enough” to put in place. But when tools arrive which make transaction costs plummet, all kinds of group action which were impossible before are now happening outside of traditional organisations, in loosely structured groups, without managerial direction or profit motive.

Group undertakings: sharing, cooperation, collective action — by order of increasing difficulty.

Cooperation is more demanding than sharing because it requires changing one’s behaviour to synchronise with others (who are also doing the same thing). Conversation is an example. This makes me think of something I wanted to say about Facebook groups: groups where all that happens is people “sharing” stuff don’t take off. Sharing doesn’t really create a sense of community like conversation does. So if one wants a community of people, one must encourage conversation, which is more difficult to achieve than simple sharing. Collaborative production (cf. wikipedia, a potluck dinner, a barn raising) is another form of cooperation, more involved than conversation.

Collective action goes a step further, ambitioning to change something in the world, creating shared responsibility by tying the group and individual identities together. Action is taken “in the name of”. This comes with a share of governance issues, especially the larger the group. The shared vision of the group needs to be strong enough to keep the group together despite the tensions arising from individual disagreement on specific decisions.

Seb Paquet: ridiculously easy group-forming. This reminds me of an O’Reilly book that I read during my year in India (I read a number of O’Reilly books there, purchased in Indian editions and therefore compatible with my student’s budget): Practical Internet Groupware. It was an eye-opener, and much of the stuff in there is still true nearly 15 years later.

Says Clay Shirky (quoting!):

Ridiculously easy group-forming matters because the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs. Now that group-forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy, we are seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new kinds of groups.

Photos Online on Flickr, Facebook, and Google+ With Lightroom [en]

[fr] Comment je fais pour publier mes photos sur Flickr, Facebook et Google+ depuis Lightroom, avec les plugins de Jeffrey Friedl.

I like Lightroom a lot and have been using it for a few years now to manage my photos. I don’t do a lot of processing/retouching, and it fills my needs perfectly:

I can organize my photos on my hard drive the way I want (monthly, then “events” if needed)
It doesn’t touch the original photos (non-destructive editing)
I can retouch, crop, and do the stuff I deem necessary to improve my photos
I can batch-rename photos according to pretty much any template I want
I can upload photos to Flickr, Facebook, and Google+ directly from Lightroom.

I’ve been using Jeffrey’s Flickr plugin for a while now. The neat thing about Lightroom is that when you “publish” photos somewhere rather than “export” them, Lightroom maintains a relationship between the published photo and the one in your catalog. This means that if six months later you go over it again, crop it differently, or retouch it again, Lightroom can update the photo on Flickr for you.

Of course, you don’t have to: you can make a virtual copy of your photo in Lightroom and work on that one, without impacting the published photo; and you’re also the one who hits the publish button to update the photo on Flickr. It doesn’t happen completely automagically.

The only problem with this is for the person who has included one of the updated Flickr photos in a blog post. Updating changes the photo file name at Flickr, and breaks the insert. Thankfully, there’s a plugin for that.

I love my Flickr account and it contains pretty much all my (published) photos. I can’t deny, however, that a lot of my online social activity happens on Facebook, and that it’s a great environment for photos to circulate. Unfortunately Facebook has really crappy photo library management, so I’ve limited myself to uploading the odd album of photos every now and again. I needed a more sustainable process which didn’t involve exporting photos from Lightroom to my hard drive and uploading them manually.

Enter Jeffrey’s Facebook plugin. As Facebook sucks, however, you shouldn’t really use the publish relationship to update photos that you’ve changed since you uploaded them to Facebook. Initially, as all I wanted to do was simplify my export-upload procedure, I used the “export” capability of the plugin. That means that instead of creating a “publish service” I created an “export preset” (File menu) to send photos directly to Facebook. Once sent, they’re sent, and live their lives on their own.

What’s nice is that I can also export photos like that directly to my pages (Tounsi and Quintus will appreciate).

Jeffrey also has a plugin for PicasaWeb, which for all practical matters pretty much means Google+ (Google Plus). Google Plus seems better at handling photo updates, so I set it up as a “publish service”.

I realized that I could use “smart publish collections” to make things simpler. My sets are already defined on Flickr. For example, I have this set of chalet photos, and I just want to reproduce it on Google+ (and Facebook). With a smart album or collection, I can tell Lightroom to “just publish those photos which are in that Flickr set”. Easy! This made me set up Facebook as a publish service too.

I love Jeffrey’s plugins because they are very well-maintained (up-to-date). There is some clunkiness in places because he really pushes beyond the limits of what Lightroom was designed for, but if you’re willing to see the odd error message or use the odd workaround, that should bother you too much. The clunkiness is amply made up for by the extensive documentation you will find both on Jeffrey’s site and in the plugins.

One such workaround is required to create a smart publish collection: because of a Lightroom bug, you have to edit the publish service and add the collection from there. But thankfully Jeffrey is really good at documenting stuff and telling you what to do and how, so you just have to follow the instructions on the screen. Basically you create a smart album or set in the “edit publish service” screen, then once it’s done edit that album to set your “smart” criteria.

Two useful things to know:

images uploaded to Google+ don’t count against your storage limit if they are smaller than 2048x2048px;
setting jpeg export quality in Lightroom to more than 75 isn’t very useful, in most cases, and just makes file size huge, slowing down your uploads considerably.

Finally, Jeffrey’s plugins are donationware. He spends a lot of time on them, and if you find them useful, you should definitely chip in.

Losing Credit [en]

[fr] De plus en plus, quand je partage un article intéressant sur Twitter ou Facebook, j'ai complètement perdu la trace de comment j'y suis arrivé. Ça m'embête, parce que je trouve important de donner un "retour d'ascenseur" (si petit soit-il) à ceux qui enrichissent mes lectures.

I have about 20 tabs open in Chrome with articles to read. And then, I have a scary number of links stacked away in Instapaper and (OMG how will I retrieve them all) many more in my Twitter favorites.

My sources for reading this day? My facebook news stream, Twitter, Tumblr, the odd e-mail from my Dad (he’s the one who pointed me to the BBC piece on the Ugly Indians of Bangalore — check out my post about them — amongst other things). I’ve signed up for Summify and though I have barely set it up, I find good reading in the daily e-mail summary it sends me. I can also see that Flipboard is going to become a source of choice for me once I’m back in Switzerland and have normal data access on my phone. And of course, once I’m reading an article, I click interesting links in it and often find other interesting articles in the traditional “related” links at the end.

Once I’m reading an article, I post snippets I find relevant to Digital Crumble, and depending on how interesting the article is, post it to Twitter, Facebook, or Climb to the Stars.

Why am I telling you all this?

I believe it’s important to give credit to those who point me to stuff interesting enough that I want to point others to it. The traditional “hat tip” or “via” mention. But I’m finding it more and more difficult to remember how I got to a particular page or article. Actually, most of the time, by the time I’m ready to reshare something, I have no clue how I arrived there.

This happened in the good old days of blogging as only king of online self-expression, of course, but less, I think. Our sources were more limited. Concentrated in one place, the aggregator. Shared by less people, in a more “personal” way (how much personal expression is there in tweet that merely states the title of an article and gives you the link?). When I click an article in my Facebook newsfeed, I don’t often pay attention to who shared it. It’s just there.

So, I wish my open tabs had some way of remembering where they came from. That, actually, is one of the reasons I like using Twitter on my phone, because the links are opened in the same application, and when I go back I see exactly which tweet I clicked the link from. Sadly, sharing snippets to Tumblr (something that’s important to me) does not exactly work well inside the mobile Twitter app.

Is anybody working on this? Is this an issue you care about too? I’d love to hear about it.

Keeping it to Myself [en]

[fr] Partager, c'est bien, mais tout partager, trop partager, tout raconter, tout vérifier, cela nous fait faire l'économie de vérifier qu'on peut tenir debout sur ses deux pieds par soi-même.

I’m a pretty open person. Too open, sometimes. Clearly, a lot of my life is on display online, though there are parts of it I keep completely offline.

In person, I talk about myself easily. I’m not very good at hiding what I think, so I tend to be in “all cards on the table” mode. It works pretty well for me. I think one of the things my clients appreciate is my honesty (and maybe my friends do, too).

But I realized over the last two years that being too open about my personal issues (this is in private/offline spaces, so you’ll be disappointed if you go hunting for stuff in this blog) does have some negative effects.

For example, I realized that once you have started telling somebody about something, it’s hard to stop in the middle of the story. Sometimes you don’t know where the story is taking you, and you might come to a point where you don’t feel like sharing it anymore.

More importantly, talking about certain emotionally charged things over and over and over and over again simply helps me stay wound up about them — whether they are good or bad things.

I spend a lot of time ruminating. Too much time. I self-analyze pretty much everything to death (and when I don’t, it’s stuff I’m pretty good at keeping myself from seeing, even in a conversation with a friend). I’m the kind of person who needs to “talk less, think less, and do more”.

So, I started not telling all my friends every single thing that was happening to me. The first step was delaying — waiting for 24 hours, for example. And I noticed that I was processing things differently. In a way, I was owning those moments and feelings more.

Another thing I did differently is I held back from asking for everybody’s opinion before every single decision I had to make. And when I did start experiencing being the sole stake-holder in some of my decisions, something interesting started to happen: my self-confidence grew.

It makes perfect sense: if you never experience dealing with something or making a choice on your own, then clearly you are sustaining a belief system (about yourself) where you are not capable of standing on your own two feet.

I’m not advocating clamming up or shutting people out. Sharing is great. I still share a lot.

I’ve just realized that systematic oversharing has its drawbacks, and that the most important drawback is not the risk of public exposure. It’s the damage it can do to your belief in yourself, by sparing you from experiencing that you actually can deal with stuff on your own.

An Experiment (Seesmic and The Black Swan) [en]

I love reading, and I have a pile of interesting books waiting for me to dig through them. I’ve just picked up The Black Swan where I left it over a month ago.

One of my frustrations with reading, I realise, is the difficulty in sharing the interesting stuff I discover. Being an online person, I’m used to being able to share all the interesting stuff I find or think of very easily. Going from printed book to the web is not that simple.

I painstakingly typed up quotes in my tumblr but honestly, it’s not the best solution. Maybe somebody will offer me a pen-scanner one day (that would be fun!) but in the meantime, I’m a bit stuck without a good bridge between my dead-tree reading and my online community.

So, I just did an experiment with Seesmic. I read out quotes and commented some of the stuff I was reading. There are two videos because (as I just discovered!) Seesmic cuts you off at 10 minutes. In total, here are 16 minutes or so of me rambling on and reading quotes to you.

The Black Swan I

The Black Swan II

Sorry for those of you who can’t see the videos. For those of you who can, do let me know if you think this is a good idea or not.

Update: more videos…

The Black Swan III

The Black Swan IV

BarCamp Lausanne: Wuala (Dominik Grolimund) [en]

[fr] Wuala: pour partager des données en ligne.

Wuala launched last week. Demo. (Closed Alpha.)

Storing, sharing, publishing files. Desktop application. Allows you to search for files. “Free, simple, and secure.*

What’s new about it? Different technology. Decentralized.

Advantages:

Free because uses resources provided by participating computers.
You get 1GB free, and get more by trading unused disk space. steph-note: so basically, this is a service that allows you to convert local disk space into online storage — it doesn’t give you significant extra storage. You need to be online for at least 4 hours a day to do that. *steph-note: I find 1Gb very little. Gmail offers 3 times that.
No traffic limits.
No file size limits.
Fast downloads. P2P. Like BitTorrent.
You can stream music and video files.
“We think it’s a great application.” Drag’n drop. Upload in the background.
Simple.
All in one place.
Security and privacy. All the files are encrypted on your computer. Your password never leaves your computer. Not even Wuala people can see your files.

Demo.

steph-note: I feel annoying. I always ask if there are “buddy list groups” or complain about their non-existence (Facebook).

Use: mainly to share a few files with other people. steph-note: not sure I’d call this “online storage” as I find it a little misleading (gives the impression you get extra storage space outside your local drives) — this is really file sharing, Pownce-like but without the timeline. For example, Dominik’s mum is going to use this to share photographs with him, because she’s not comfortable putting them on Flickr as it’s “on the internet”. steph-note: I see this as an interesting alternative to dropsend and the like.

Question: what is the business model? Ads in the client. steph-note: alternate business model would be to make people pay to have more actual “storage”.

Privacy: in Switzerland, there are “anti-spying” laws which would protect Wuala from having to surrender data to the CIA etc., for example. Wuala doesn’t see what is private or shared (regarding content). Very strong emphasis on privacy. steph-note: “illegal” music and TV series sharing system of choice, if there is more storage. Problem with this strong emphasis on privacy is when people start using the service to trade kiddie porn. Dominik says one of the solutions to this could be to limit the size of groups.

Careful! if you lose the password, you lose your files. steph-note: ouch! this sounds unacceptable to me… no possibility to reset it? Secret question: I hate them, because they are usually very weak. What’s the point of having great encryption, secure passwords, if people give secret answers to secret questions which aren’t so secret?

Should keep a local version of all the files you share. steph-note: so this is really not extra storage. What makes it so different from a prettily dressed up FTP client, besides the fact that the underlying technology is different? From a user point of view? Encryption, and sharing with friends/groups.

steph-note: a bit skeptical about this, though parts do indeed sound interesting. Not sure what I’d use it for. Maybe to swap music.

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.