Online Media Cultist

I’d like to see FriendFeed partner with Google Reader on something that I believe the Inner Web Nerds in all of us freak out with joy and exultation. Not a Google purchase of FriendFeed (which was founded by ex-Googlers, by the way), just a straight up partnership that further integrates FriendFeed functionality into Google Reader.

Here’s how it would work.

I’ve written before about how much I love Google Reader’s “shared + note” feature. It’s a fun and somewhat addictive way to jot little notes, thoughts, and opinions about stories that you’re sharing while browsing through your RSS feeds via Google Reader.

Now, things get really cool when you factor in reading the jotted notes/thoughts/opinions that your friends are sharing as well. It’s a quick and efficient way to read stories that your contacts have vetted as worthy of attention along with jotted notes besides, a modern day version of newspaper clippings that made their way around offices with sticky notes attached.

Just today I was reading a story that was shared by my friend Jason Kaneshiro and read his shared + note along with it. And this is where I got to thinking… I wanted to respond to Jason’s shared + note with my own shared + note.

Of course I can do this now in a sense, but there are a few barriers to perfecting this next step. The first way I can do it is to simply add my shared + note, attribute Jason’s comment, and share my own thought. This is a bit clunky, however, in that people reading my shared items won’t get a full sense of what Jason was saying, and the onus is on me to convey Jason’s thoughts properly, which in theory can take some time, effort, and expertise.

The second way is slightly better, more time consuming, and begins to bring FriendFeed into the picture. I can track down Jason’s FriendFeed profile page on FriendFeed, search or browse my way to the very same shared story, and add my comment to the thread that he began there. The problem here, of course, is that I’m adding my thoughts on the FriendFeed “side” and have therefore neglected the shared + note option in Google Reader that I was so excited about in the first place.

All of that said, I think it’s pretty extraordinary that sharing and shared + note already have an existing FriendFeed tie-in. That is, if you add your Google Reader RSS feed to your FriendFeed profile, all of your shared and shared + note stories show up on your FriendFeed “life stream.”

So to get back to my original thought, what I would think to be a natural next step is to allow shared + note comments to tie together on both Google Reader and FriendFeed.

So in other words, I can reply to Jason’s comment on a shared story using shared + note, and both of those comments would “automagically” show up on both of our shared items within Google Reader, and both of our life streams on FriendFeed.

One final cherry on top: give people the option to turn this feature off it annoys them.

It wouldn’t be annoying to me though – I’d make it a significant part of my social media interaction.

This is just an initial blast of thinking about what I think could be a great new feature. What say all of y’all?