New ‘Notes’ Turns Google Reader Into a Web Clipping Machine
Google has quietly expanded Google Reader’s sharing capabilities with a new feature dubbed "Notes" for annotating items in your feeds. To use the new feature just click the "Share with note" link at the bottom of any feed item, enter whatever comment text you’d like and the note will show up when you share that item.
You can also post notes without tying them to a specific Reader item, which makes it a bit like Twitter or FriendFeed, but without the ability to get feedback from friends. There’s also a new bookmarklet that you can use “add any item from around the web to Google Reader.” Essentially it’s a page clipping tool much like what Google Notebook offers.
In fact, from what I can tell, Google Reader’s Notes feature offers just about everything that Google Notebook already has, save the nice organizing features found in Notebook.
You might be wondering how Notes (and what basically amounts to bookmarking) fits with Google Reader (ostensibly an RSS reader), which is a valid question. It seems like this a further expansion of Google’s plan to turn Google Reader into a more social application, but unfortunately the experience is something of a letdown and could easily be abused.
For instance, Notes show up in your shared items feed, which means that you can view any of your friend’s shared notes as well. However, while notes are displayed much like feed items the text they contain is totally customizable, which means you can overwrite the content of the link. For notes that are tied to a feed item or web page that means that while the headline and byline are from the page in question, the note text is not, which seems ripe for abuse.
Another strange quirk is default behavior of Notes. Notes made using the bookmarklet offer a check box to control whether or not the note is shared, but notes typed independent of any link are automatically shared and to make them private you need to open the note and uncheck the shared option.
There also doesn’t seem to be a way to delete notes, which means I get to stare at the two test notes I created for this post for all of eternity (or at least until Google adds a delete feature).
Although I think the Notes feature is nice, it feels a bit confused at the moment. In order to be more useful Google needs to clean up the interface and make the sharing behavior consistent regardless of the context.
Of course Google Reader’s Notes are easy to ignore if you simply don’t like the idea at all.
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