> Regarding friends you haven't chatted with: As Zac T noted, what
> you're seeing here is probably a side effect of a Gmail feature. Go to
> your Gmail settings and click the "Chat" link. You'll see an "auto-
> add" option there that adds people to your chat contact list when
> you've emailed with them. That bypasses the ordinary approval step you
> have to go through to chat with someone (on the assumption that it's
> okay because you're already communicating with them). You can turn
> this option off if you're not comfortable with that.
I do not use and have never used your chat. I use gmail without it.
Why do I have to care about it, do you need to force it on people with
reader?
> * Your friends list doesn't necessarily include everyone in your Gmail
> address book. It is limited to people you have chatted with on Google
> Talk and who also use Google Reader.
I use gmail without google talk. I have never used google talk. Yet
I am seeing shared items from some arbitrary people who I have
exchanged emails with.
Please take into account that not everyone uses google talk and do not
force those of us who do not to use it to opt out.
> A name that appears in your Reader friends list is the nickname from
> your friend's profile.
Again, this is not true. When you added me to the Friends list of
every person I have ever had Gmail contact with, you used my full
first and last name, despite the fact that I had hidden my last name
on my Gmail profile. I mentioned this several days ago (it's message
#63 in this thread) and you ignored it, just as you have ignored
virtually all of the concerns that everyone here has voiced.
At this point, the response from Google makes us feel as though we're
talking to a child who insists that LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!
I have already stopped using Reader and resumed using Bloglines
because of this, and if Google continues to be unresponsive, I may
stop using Gmail and return to Yahoo mail.
AND, whether you like it, or not, you MUST respond to this pop-up
advertisement before you can do ANYTHING with your existing Google
Reader account.
YOU CAN NOT remove the pop-up advertisement without indicating
(accepting?) its terms & conditions.
YOU CAN NOT read your feeds until you respond to this pop-up
advertisement.
YOU CAN NOT remove this pop-up advertisement.
YOU CAN NOT logout, and re-log-back-in to remove this pop-up
advertisement.
I am deleting my Google Reader account because of this pop-up
advertisement.
I do not use Google Talk but I do use Google Chat in a limited way. I
have deleted Gmail contacts (which I have written before should not
even be necessary) but they still appear in my Reader "friends" list.
There is one user who can read my shared items but because of the
nickname thing I can't figure out who she is. It doesn't matter though
because even if I delete her from my contacts, SHE WILL STILL BE ON MY
"FRIENDS" LIST!
I feel like I'm talking to a wall here. This whole thing is a horrible
mess.
> Additionally, please note that blocking a person in Google Talk
> doesn't remove them from your Reader friends list. They'll need to be
> actually deleted for this to happen.
> Additionally, please note that blocking a person in Google Talk
> doesn't remove them from your Reader friends list. They'll need to be
> actually deleted for this to happen.
I deleted the contact. Still there under "Other Friends". Am I
seeing the name there because *I* am on *their* chat contact list?
Another update: On the Friends Settings page, if you mouse over a
contact's name, you'll see their email address. This should help with
the issue of unrecognized nicknames.
fantastic graham. That's the exact update that we've all been asking
for!
no wait, that doesn't address our concerns at all. can we speak with
your manager or something? you clearly aren't addressing our concerns
at all, and this has become comical.
> Another update: On the Friends Settings page, if you mouse over a
> contact's name, you'll see their email address. This should help with
> the issue of unrecognized nicknames.
All of us on the Reader team are paying attention and are aware of the
feedback from this group. However, we do need to balance all these
concerns with keeping the feature useful for those who like it and use
it. (There aren't many of those on this thread, granted, but this is
only a small subset of the people using this feature.) The incremental
changes we've been making this week have been aimed at finding the
most reasonable compromise.
Let me reiterate: If you're uncomfortable sharing items, you can
unshare everything in a single click. With just a few more clicks, you
can move all those items to a new tag, to preserve your organization.
After unsharing, any privacy concerns you had about sharing your
shared items should be taken care of.
We are aware that friends management is still very basic at this
stage. Your Google Talk contact list is taken as an approximation of
the set of people you're interested in communicating with, but you can
remove people from that list as necessary if you don't wish to see
their items. The update I mentioned today was intended to help in
that, since various folks have expressed confusion about who's who in
their lists.
We do intend to keep iterating and improving this feature, though
we'll necessarily slow down a bit over the holidays. Thanks for your
patience, and we do hope you'll end up enjoying the sharing
functionality of Reader.
I support Brandon Bloom's suggestion that we be given more tools to
initiate discussions based on the feeds we share.
When I share a feed, I don't just want to give someone a link or
repeat the entire article verbatim. I want to get a discussion going.
The people I regularly share feeds with want to do this too.
The current mechanism is a bit clumsy. We can "email" an article to a
friend, but we're restricted to attaching a 1,000 character response.
Sometimes this is enough to get a conversation going, but on more than
one occasion I've wanted to write something more substantial. Once
someone starts replying, then we effectively switch to the Gmail
interface and have no restrictions, but I'd like to see that initial
1,000 character limit lifted.
As Brandon also pointed out, sending shared articles to someone via
email can also be problematic. We don't want to bombard everyone's
inboxes with these sorts of things. Instead, we need a common meeting
point outside of our email applications. Google Reader and the recent
Shared Stuff are good starting points. What I'd like to see evolve is
a single Shared Stuff meeting point that all the various Google
applications feed into. What we do in each application is our own
business. When we want to share stuff, we take it to the big melting
pot. Here we have complete control over who we share stuff with.
At the moment, things are all over the place, with each Google
application having its own unique methods of sharing that have no
bearing or similarity to the others. What I'd like to do is go to one
place where I can see all the Google Documents, Discussions, Maps,
News Feeds/Articles, Bookmarks, etc. that I'm sharing with people and
control all my privacy/opt-in/opt-out options there. I'm guessing this
is where Google are going to take Shared Stuff eventually.
> What I really want is the ability to start a "Discussion" with one or
> more contacts or contact groups. The first post in the discussion
> should be the article and each of the people invited to the discussion
> should see this discussion on the list of things I have shared with
> them.
Hacks and workarounds for a flawed system are not long term solutions.
All it would have taken is one checkbox.
Do you want to activate this feature? Y/N
Trust takes a hell of a lot of effort to build and very little effort
to piss away. By not giving us that checkbox you have pissed away a
large amount of trust that I and the other unsatisfied people here
had.
On the positive side, keep in mind that the reason that you see the
level of anger that you do in here about this is precisely due to the
fact that we generally do have so much trust for Google as a company.
Nevertheless, I somehow doubt that the stockholders of Google would be
quite so happy to see the Google Reader team frittering away the
companies REAL main resource, and for what? "Hey look! We are social
too! Yay!" Is it worth it?
