Google Reader now allows comment threads on shared items.
With our new conversation feature, you can have private discussions on shared items with your friends. Now, instead of obsessively asking everyone in your office if they have seen that awesome lego cake article you shared last night, they can tell you how awesome you are, right within Google Reader!
My initial thought on this was glee, as it’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. My second thought was dismay.
First off, it’s yet one more place to hold a conversation. Yes, conversation is good. Yes, sharing comments on something is arguably better (and retains, think, the share-with-note info) than simply repeating the post and losing what someone else has written about it.
But this now pulls more commentary and discussion from personal spaces (blogs, Facebook, etc.) and into another aggregator. Why comment about my post on, say, this, when you can comment on the GReader item that spawned it?
But aside from lack of egoboo, what’s the harm. Simple — Google Reader’s data is not clearly persistent, nor is it easy to find. Which means that, essentially, after that brief interchange, that conversation is gone. I have now idea how far back the GReader cache goes, but even if it’s eternal (knowing Google), it’s non-trivial to retrieve other than by a search. And the historian / journalist / writer in me weeps a bit over that, because I like my reality a bit more persistent than “Huh, I think I read something about that once.” I have my own memory to do that for me.
This has been a problem with sharing-with-a-note before now. But now it’s not just single pontifications being lost, but dialog.
Now, will this keep me from doing comments on items? For trivial items, no. For more serious ones — I’ll consider whether it’s the best venue for doing so.