I wish FriendFeed or Google Reader would tell me who’s sharing my stories
Using FriendFeed and Google Reader in tandem is great. On FriendFeed, I get access to a huge range of stories that people are sharing, and the one-click ability to “like” the stories I like is an easy and addictive way to add my two-cents to the stories I, well… like. And of course if I want to add more than two cents I can hop in and leave a comment. And on the Google Reader-end I can share stories that I’m into, giving other people on FriendFeed access to the stories I’m checking out in the same way.
This is all great… but, there’s a small but to throw in there.
This morning, I wrote a story called The post-blogging generation. During the day, I noticed that Online Media Cultist was picking up a nice amount of traffic from the story, with the general referral coming from somewhere on FriendFeed.
This has happened to me a number of times. It’s fantastic to know that one’s story is getting checked out somehow, but always a bit frustrating to not be able to pinpoint the source. And in the case of FriendFeed, I’d love to be able to know who is sharing the story, who is liking it, and most of all I’m keen to check out and respond to comments.
Now, the first thing I investigated of course was to see if people were responding to the story on FriendFeed through my own personal feed. As had also happened several times in the past, this was not the case. After a minute of mulling the situation, I decided to use FriendFeed’s search bar to search for keywords in my story’s title.
Bingo. I found no less than five people – including (the omnipresent and perhaps omniscient) Louis Gray, Hutch Carpenter, Marco, Mike Fruchter, and Colin Walker – who had shared the story using Google Reader. Each iteration of the share had picked up its own smattering of kindly “likers” and even a few generous comments.
So in essence the whole decentralization of conversations… conversation is hitting home here. It would be really nice if there was an easy way for me to see – on the Google Reader-side or more realistically on the FriendFeed-side – who is sharing my stories. Even if all of conversations and likes aren’t brought together in a One Ring to Rule Them All kind of way, it would be great if there was an easier way to get a Big Picture view on the shares than hunting them down through search.
Or am I merely being lazy?
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