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Comment by nathanb | Hacker News Reader

This is horrifyingly frustrating. It's like when they started adding people from my email contacts to my Google Talk friends list or when they thought my gtalk friends list needed to be all up in my Google Reader friends list. Google don't seem to understand the natural partitioning of social spaces that occurs in the real world.

(I do concur that Circles allow this partitioning to be modeled much more accurately than most other social networking systems, but the partitioning before was entirely organic and natural, not constructed. I will wait and see how well they implement the integration before conclusively declaring Reader to have jumped the shark, but honestly the social features ("just enough social to get by", which is about as much social as I can put up with) were the only things keeping me on Reader up until this point.

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I have the exact opposite experience. I find it horribly frustrating to have all these contacts in different services surfaced to me in weird inconsistent ways.

GTalk are for me a subset of email contacts.

I'm ecstatic that G+ sharing is being integrated with GReader, because I share a lot on GReader, but not everything I share is pertinent to all of my GReader friends.

Ideally, they'll add a "public circles" feature or something like it, that allows people to subscribe to specific subjects that I define and share to specifically, which would be public, but not pushed into everyone's main timelines.

[Edit: To expand a bit, I hope we'll be able to view those public circles in Reader, since that's the ideal interface for it, and not just in Plus.]

[Edit 2: Thinking a bit more about it, I think I'd prefer to consume all Plus content (except maybe photos, I really like the gallery layout) in the Reader UI. I simply find it to be more efficient.

Here's the problem: when I share something on Reader, I know that it will only be seen on Reader by my other friends who have specifically opted-in to say "I want to see stuff Nathan has shared". It is very reasonable to add a feature allowing me to comment on these shared items, since that's a pretty big value add.

When I share something to Plus, now it shows up to people who are on Plus. They are not in "let's read my RSS feeds" mode, they're in "let's see what my friends are up to" mode. My shared article, instead of being just another item to read and potentially comment on, has intruded on their social activity. If they wanted to read about quantum tunneling, they would have gone to Reader, not to Plus. Plus is where you go to read about your cousin's new haircut.

Sure, I agree. But the problem is, what about the people who are on Reader to read about souffles? They don't want to read about quantum tunneling. But you sometimes post about both.

You're describing a distinction that exists on a service level now, that's basically arbitrary and inconsistent. With everything pushed to Plus and pulled back out of Plus, you can define not only social contexts like 'friends,' 'co-workers,' and 'family,' but also subject matter like 'souffles' and 'quantum tunneling.' This is a good thing.

N.B. I think this will only be truly useful if they add public circles as I describe earlier.

Based on the arguments presented here, I agree that using the contexts that users set up in G+ makes sense. Having said that, I think the part that isn't clear to everyone (well, myself anyway) is whether things will be "pulled back out of Plus". I really hope they will, but...

I wonder about it, too, but this gives me hope:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019052

I don't think Google will copy buzz's aggregate all mode into our + feeds, but then again I'm not sure what they'll do with Reader shares.

I guess I'll share certain articles to specific circles, if I share them from reader at all.

I also kind of want public groups, but the way it works is you have to search for topics.

Google don't seem to understand the natural partitioning of social spaces that occurs in the real world.

I think they understand it just fine, hence Circles (as you say). This makes my life a lot easier: I use Reader a great deal but have not made much use of the social features as the contact management was poor. I don't want multiple contact lists, it's duplicative and inefficient to have several where one will do.

I don't expect any of the core features of google reader to change. Why would they?

Sure, sharing and friends will be replaced by Google+ variants, but to me that sounds like a good thing. Instead of copying articles and pasting them into Google+, I'll be able to just hit share.

You are coming from the position that you would like to share articles on Google plus. Is it so inconceivable to you that any other position exists? I have no desire to share articles on G+, and in fact many of the people I share with do not have G+ accounts, nor do they want them.

This. Times one thousand.

Then don't share articles. Read them and be happy, like many do.

nathanb said that he doesn't want to share on G+, but is fine sharing _within_ Reader. It's the idea that they're combining the two together.

I'm in nathanb's boat - I share articles with people within Reader, but I don't want those to be pushed to G+. Similarly, I don't want to be forced to read other people's links through G+.

can't you just put those people you share with on reader into a circle on google plus and then just share it with that circle?

And they said they said they are integrating the two better, so I'm assuming its possible for them can make the sharing between the two fairly fluid.

Yeah, that's what they're pushing everyone towards: "you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles".

My bigger concern is the disconnect in sharing. Are they turning Reader into a one-way service, in that you share items to G+? It would seem incongruous to share things through Reader, but then have to go into G+ to see what other people shared.

It would be nice to have a panel inside Google Reader which would display only the G+ material shared from Google Reader - although I doubt they will do it that way. Anyhow, they surely will find a way to screw things up :P

This is getting into "architecture astronaut" territory, but Reader could have a "Google+" folder that aggregates "friend feeds" (of G+ status updates and shared articles). Does Google+ already publish RSS feeds for user content?

So use the 'Send To' feature, which lets you share with some 10 or 15 other social services out of the box, and even lets you manually add your own. You can ignore Google+ completely if you don't want to use it, it's just going to be the default option. I can't see how you'll be forced to read anyone else's links through G+. One of the reasons I like the service is that it's easy to keep in touch with people but also easy to filter out stuff that I'm not interested in.

I meant to say that I never used Google Reader's sharing mechanisms.

Those features of Google Reader (friends, sharing) were useless dupes of other features present elsewhere on other websites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter). I already have enough friend lists to maintain as is.

I used Google Reader for reading, and that is it. I don't care that they integrate it with Google+, although to me it makes sense. I just care that they remove the useless separate list and ecosystem.

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