Google Reader+ And Identity vs. Personas

Google has announced that Google Reader will finally get a much-needed revamp. It will now be integrated with Google Plus, and its native isolated social network will be abandoned. See Techmeme for responses from the tech blogger community. The response from Google enthusiasts has been largely positive, as you can see in this Google Plus thread. For non-Google enthusiast responses, see this Hacker News thread.

As a heavy user of Google Reader, I have mixed responses to this announcement.

Positives

  • Google Reader will finally get a much-needed UI revamp. I suspect removing the native social follower-model within Google Reader will make it much faster.
  • Sharing from Google Reader to Google Plus will be much easier. I can quickly share an item from my Google Reader to my “Tech Enthusiasts” circle on Google Plus.
  • No way to get an RSS feed of your Google Reader shares. Many people use this RSS feed for auto-posting shares on their WordPress/Blogger/Tumblr blogs, in addition to Twitter. Of these, Twitter is where the most noise is generated by this auto-posting. I have written about this in great detail before.

Negatives

  • No way to follow a highly-curated tech-focused feed of other Google Reader enthusiasts. As a passionate Reader enthusiast who stays on top of tech news all day, my feelings about missing this feed is well expressed by Sarah on TechCrunch.

Understanding the Root Problem

My Google Reader shared feed is a tech-focused feed and nothing else. My Google Plus feed, however, is a mix of personal photos, personal blog posts, shares as a father about my daughter, etc. Where will my Google Reader followers get my tech-focused feed now? No, Google Circles doesn’t solve the problem.

The reason I have this tech-focused blog, and keep a separate personal blog (where I’m currently writing about Western Classical Music appreciation) is that readers of this blog expect to read tech-focused posts, while friends who know me personally enjoy reading my personal blog too. I do not pollute my own Google Reader shared items with my own personal blog posts.

The reason I have two separate Twitter accounts is for the same reason. @ScepticGeek is well-known as a tech expert, while people who either know me in real life or are interested in my other non-tech interests follow @Palsule. Different people even call me in real-life either as “Mahendra” or “ScepticGeek”.

Identity and Personas

Both Google and Facebook are now forcing me to be myself with all my varied interests in all my sharing and engagement on those networks. Twitter allows me to be two different persona. This is a crucial difference, recently described best by Chris Poole, nicely summarized by Tim Carmody here. The money quote:

Both Google+ (with Circles) and Facebook (with Smart Lists) misunderstand the core problem of online identity: It’s not only about who you’re sharing with, but how you represent yourself. “It’s not who you share with, but who you share as.”

On Google Reader I am @ScepticGeek, on Facebook I am @Palsule, on Twitter I can be both, and now I wonder what I am supposed to be on Google Plus.

The Future: Focus on Interest Graph

Does this mean Google Plus necessarily becomes a place of incongruous, irrelevant shares? No. What we need is better filters for relevance. I have written before about how Quora complements the Social Graph with an Interest Graph for greater relevance as well as serendipity. As a general-purpose social network, Google Plus needs to do more.

We need to be quickly able to filter the Google Plus feed by source – Google Reader, Photos, YouTube, etc. Google needs to invent a way to auto-tag/auto-classify Google Plus posts such that I can view a feed of tech news, personal photos, humor, photography, etc. using a simple UI filter.

This problem is understood by Bill Gross, who started Chime.in as a way to “Follow a Part of a Person”, the idea being that you can follow both @ScepticGeek and @Palsule on the same network, and depending on your interests, you will auto-magically see only the shares you are interested in. But with the likes of Google and Facebook in the race for dominance of the social web, it is unclear whether new startups focusing exclusively on this problem stand a chance.

Do you know who is already capitalizing on this problem and is hugely successful? Tumblr. Most people use Tumblr by sticking to a specific area of interest, and the social network makes it easy to follow others sharing your interests. With 850 million Facebook users, 50 million Google Plus users, why are there almost 30 million Tumble blogs out there with over 10 billion posts? I suspect it is because neither Facebook, nor Google Plus are an interest-based social network like Tumblr. The future war of the social web hinges on who better creates the most relevant experience for users.

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How I Live and Breathe Google Reader

I spend my entire day in Google Reader and Twitter to get tech news. I am sharing my Reader experience here so that I may learn from any tips you might have or the other way around.

Feed Organization

Tip: Prioritize your feeds in folders.

This is typically how my Reader looks when I start my day in the morning:Reader Shared Items

  • Me is my own posts and my tweets faved by others
  • BuzzShares are people I follow on Buzz (about 65 at present)
  • GoodShares are a group of about a dozen people
  • LG-RobDiana are shares by Louis Gray and Rob Diana
  • Google is for Google’s official updates
  • Tech has about 50-55 feeds mostly from individual tech blogs
  • MajorTech are the big tech blogs like TechCrunch, RWW, and GigaOM.

The sequence of folders is arranged by priority from bottom-up. Thus, depending on the time I can spend at any moment, I travel my way up in this hierarchy.

Tip: By adding a person’s shared items to a folder in Reader, you can unfollow the person in Buzz if you wish, while continuing to see their Reader shares.

My Stats (Trends)

Here are my key stats for the past month:

Reader Trends Main

Thus, I am sharing about 160 items/week, or about 20-22 items/day.

Reader Trends Graph

My ‘items read’ count might probably look different than other heavy Reader users. This is because of Techmeme as well as Twitter. About 80% of the time, I’ve already read and am aware of the news that arrives in Google Reader, or is a duplicate of an item I’ve read.

Subscription Stats

The following stats are interesting:

Reader Shared Items Per Day

You can see that some folks, including myself, share on Reader at a rate comparable to the number of posts by major tech blogs.

Disconnecting Reader from Buzz

I have disconnected my Reader shares on Buzz. I will wait till Buzz provides better filtering options. In my experience, it is easier for me to follow other’s Reader shares in Reader, than in Buzz in terms of efficiently finding tech news.

Buzz is a better place to have conversations and engagement on one’s Reader items. But what’s ‘engagement’ for one, can often be ‘noise’ for another. Without better filters, this engagement is simply force-fed noise on Buzz.

Going Forward

Because curation and sharing is primarily my work at Techmeme, I am increasingly focusing on sharing other stuff on Reader and omitting major news items in my Reader shares. This falls into several different categories – social media, how-to, personal, opinion, media, lifestreaming, etc. – stuff that doesn’t typically appear on Techmeme. If you are interested, do follow me on Reader.

I appreciate and value the shares of people I follow in Google Reader. Thank you for making it such an enriching place!

Please do share your tips, if any.

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Google Buzz + Reader + Twitter + Facebook = Noise

I’m having a hard time deciding whom to follow on which network with duplicate shares everywhere. The problem is compounded further by folks who auto-share from one network to another. There is no value in following people who share the same thing on Reader, Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Duplication simply amplifies noise and reduces signal.

This is a real problem with social media today. Everyone wants maximum likes, shares, retweets on each and every thing they share. Their hope, understandably, is that each morsel they throw into social media becomes a feast on which everyone will drool.

Well, count me out. If someone is auto-feeding the same thing on all networks, it doesn’t add any value to me to follow them on all networks. Especially if they are not engaging in conversation where their content is landing.

I have written before about why I do not use auto-tweeting tools like Reader2Twitter, because I take as much effort as possible to attribute my sources. If you are using such tools, it makes sense to auto-tweet to a different Twitter account, like some folks do. This gives your followers the choice whether to follow you on Reader or Twitter.

Enter Buzz and FriendFeed and Facebook. Each of these is capable of pulling items from multiple sources for each person. FriendFeed can further be imported into Facebook and Buzz. This is not just aggregation, it is super-aggregation or aggregation-squared. This amplifies signals to such enormous proportions that all this noise is deafening.

Each of my shares on Twitter, Reader, and Facebook are hand-picked and manual. It takes extra effort but I believe it adds value to those who follow me. I am happy not being a social media superstar with thousands of followers if even a single person likes a single share of mine in a day. My value is not in the number of retweets, number of likes, etc., but in the feedback I get from even a single @reply or comment.

Neither of the companies behind each of these social networks are working with each other to design better filters for all of us. Each simply wants us to use them exclusively. There lies the problem. We hop on to each new social network bandwagon, immediately discover tools that allow us to auto-share and auto-propagate our shared content down stream, up stream, cross stream, life stream, etc., ultimately drowning our followers in the flood.

I am skeptic this problem will go away soon. As a curator, this is a challenge. The only way I see to successfully filter the signal out of this noise is to be brutal in curating sources. Auto-sharers, auto-tweeters, auto-feeders, or whatever these tools are called, will be the first on my radar as likely candidates to be unfollowed.

As a follower, I am a human. When you auto-share, you’re not a human on that network, you turn into a bot. Bots are what we call spam.

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Optimize Google & Google Reader for Widescreen in Chrome

If you are using a widescreen monitor with an aspect ratio of 16:9 or 16:10, you will notice that Google Search and Google Reader waste most of the screen real estate on the right side.

Here are two extensions for Google Chrome that you might find useful.

Dual-Pane Google Search

The searchw Chrome Extension creates a partition on the right, in which you can preview the results of your Google Search. Effectively, it turns your Google Results into a kind of Table of Contents and the experience is like viewing PDF files.

searchw Chrome extn

You can open a result in a new tab and reduce/enlarge the frame sizes. It also comes with hotkey support.

Google Reader for Widescreen

This Greasemonkey script for making Google Reader widescreen-friendly was earlier made popular by Gina Trapani at Lifehacker for Firefox. With native support for Greasemonkey, it now works like a charm in Google Chrome.

Google Reader Default

Google Reader Widescreen

The best part of this script is that it works automatically in the background requiring no user interaction at all.

If you’re using a widescreen monitor, do check these out.

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Google Reader vs. Twitter for Discovery and Sharing

I started using Google Reader and Twitter for discovering and sharing content at roughly the same time in April last year. I share and tweet almost exactly the same content. After about 8 months, I have over 1100 followers on Twitter vs. 133 on Google Reader.

How do these two stack against each other from a discovery and sharing perspective? As a newcomer to the social web, my experience can be illustrative of any new user of these services.

A Glace At Follower Stats

In less than a year, I have 1100+ followers and am on 130+ Twitter Lists. Neither did the #FollowFriday or @MrTweet recommendations I received lead to any increase in followers, nor did being a Techmeme Editor lead to any surge in followers. My Twitter following has increased organically, steadily, without any positive disruptive event, like a recommendation by an influencer in any blog post or tweet.

TwitterCounter ScepticGeek Followers

On the other hand, I have promoted my Google Reader shares on my blog in a sidebar widget, tweeted and written about Google Reader often, commented on other blog posts discussing Google Reader, and shared my Reader feed on FriendFeed earlier. The only positive disruptive event that increased my Google Reader following was when I was recommended by Holden on TechGeist (the blog is no longer active).

Google Reader Sharing Stats

Geographical Perspective

The people I follow on both networks are in US/EU. Even if I live in India, most of the people following me on both networks are also from US/EU. I overcome the local limits of real-time by using Google Reader for discovery. One may expect my Twitter following to be more local and my Google Reader following to be global, but interestingly, this is not the case.

Twitter Follower Geography

I can tell from my engagement and Retweets on Twitter that my audience is largely global and not local.

The Discovery Angle

There are two aspects of discovery: content and people. It is clear that Google Reader remains a great tool for discovery of content, especially for a non-US/EU person like me. However, Google Reader sucks at discovering great people to follow.

It is easier to find the Twitter profile of a person with a search on Google, than finding his or her Google Profile. FriendFeed remains the best bet for finding Google Reader profiles.

You can easily crawl an influencer’s network on Twitter and use Twitter Lists for discovering great people to follow. Ever tried finding out who an influencer is following on Google Reader?

The Sharing Angle

My shares on Twitter get retweeted and often lead to conversation. Some kind folks practice thanksgiving via attribution when they tweet content they discovered via my Google Reader shares. Both these lead to psychological payback on Twitter in terms of increased followers, mentions, and list memberships.

On Google Reader, my shares disappear into a black hole. I never know when my share was re-shared by others. These re-shares also appear on other user’s FriendFeed and Twitter accounts without any attribution to the curator. Sharing on Google Reader has virtually zero psychological payback, unless you are an established tech celebrity.

Closing Thoughts

Google Reader was designed as a personal RSS feed reader and social features have been added as an after-thought. I was always a skeptic of claims that Google Reader will replace FriendFeed. Google lacks a social network of people, and prefers taking an algorithmic approach to social relevancy. There is no psychological payback for sharing on Google Reader because fundamentally, Google perceives you not as a person, but as a data element whose shares can be indexed and ranked. Is this a reflection of Google’s engineers lacking emotional intelligence or simply a technical limitation? That said, it still remains a great tool for discovery of content, because of RSS.

As a result of all this, I see the influencer-ordinary user pyramid on Google Reader remaining more or less the same in the years to come. There will be a few tech influencers who will get engagement and drive traffic via Google Reader, but its opaque approach to social networking will remain its Achilles’ Heel for ordinary users. This weakness has even given rise to parallel feed-based social networks like Toluu and PostRank. The fundamental problem of monetization of Google Reader also persists.

What this also means is apps and services that use RSS and relevancy algorithms for discovery and ease sharing of content to other social networks (Twitter & Facebook) are well-positioned to diminish Google Reader’s dominance of the feed reader market. Apps like LazyFeed, my6sense, and RSSOwl are some examples. In my opinion, it would be a good strategy for apps like Feedly to disassociate themselves from the Google Reader platform.

Twitter is a great tool for discovery of content, and its transparency makes it a unique tool for discovery of people. This means that the influencer pyramid on Twitter is constantly evolving, unlike Google Reader. Lastly, Twitter rules over Google Reader when it comes to payback for sharing.

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The Local Nature of Real-Time Means RSS Rules Forever

I wanted to make an observation about real-time and the Google Reader vs. Twitter war, about which Louis excellently summarizes the advantages of both in this post.GoogleReader.jpg

While real-time technology is removing all barriers to instant communication and information flow everywhere, there are geographical and biological limitations that it has not overcome yet. While announcements and press releases are being made from Silicon Valley, half the world who lives on the other side of the planet is sleeping.

Scoble, who doesn’t use Google Reader anymore, compares Techmeme with Twitter Lists, also noted:

If you don’t read tweets for eight hours, don’t worry, all the big stuff you missed will be on TechMeme.

My point exactly. Most of the world sleeps anywhere between 6-9 hours a day, and does many other things besides being on Twitter. When they wake up and want to get updated with the major tech news of the day, Twitter is of no help. This is not a limitation of Twitter, it’s just the local aspect of real-time.

When I observe who follows who on Twitter, sure there are millions of cases where people follow folks from around the world. But if someone were to make a statistical analysis of everyone on Twitter, I think it would be clear that the majority of follows are within their own country. The same may not be true of their Google Reader subscriptions or the links in their blogrolls on WordPress.com. This is why, RSS will continue to rule, as long as the earth keeps rotating, we have nights and days, and need to sleep.

A real-life example encapsulating all this happened yesterday, when I felt earthquake tremors at home here in India. I tweeted about the earthquake from my personal Twitter account where I occasionally indulge in India-specific news, did not tweet from my tech-focused ScepticGeek account, and obviously did not bother to blog about it even on my personal blog.

There was no need for the rest of the world to know about those mild tremors, and it did not hit Techmeme. The Twitter feed of my personal account was filled with tweets about the earthquake, but this would have been “noise” to others. Those who follow me on Google Reader did not get any such noise.

This is the local nature of real-time. This is also why I agree with Mark Dykeman, who noted the difference between a reasonable time web and a real-time one.

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Thanksgiving via Attribution

I am a prolific sharer on social networks like Google Reader and Twitter. On this Thanksgiving, let me share some of my observations about attribution, and how I try to practice it. Specifically, I discuss attribution while sharing on social networks, not while writing blog posts, which has fairly well-understood practices.

Attribution while sharing in social media, as I understand it, is crediting the author who created or the person from whom you discovered, the content that you share with your network.

j0433005

When I Discover Content

If I have discovered the article, I share it on Google Reader without any additional effort. On Twitter, I try to include the author’s Twitter handle “by @authorname” while sharing it. In this way, users reading my tweet can easily follow the author if they like the content and wish to do so.

In many cases, ReTweet buttons on blogs do not generate a tweet that includes author names. If I happen to know the Twitter handle, I insert it myself. There are times when I don’t, and here I fail to attribute the author.

Tech Blogs Auto-Tweeting Posts

I like how TechCrunch and The Next Web append “by @authorname” to their automated tweets. This is the blog’s way of attributing content to their authors, possibly increasing their author’s Twitter followers and influence.

I observe that other blogs like Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and MakeUseOf don’t do so. This may be to shorten the number of characters to make their tweets easier to retweet, or simply an act of omission.

Sharing from Google Reader to Twitter

If I discover a post shared by someone I follow on Google Reader and share it on Twitter, I try to include both the author of the post (by @author) and the person thanks to whom I discovered it (via @source). This of course, assumes that the person has a Twitter account (true in almost all cases), and is very easy to do.

Most tools that ease transfer of your RSS share to Twitter don’t credit the intermediary. Thus, if you share on Twitter via Feedly, FriendFeed, Reader2Twitter, etc. your followers on Twitter have no clue from whom you discovered your content. Ease of automated sharing is at the cost of attribution. This is why I do not use any such tool. I try to include my source in my Twitter shares, and my “via @source” tweets are my way of saying “Thanks to”.

Sharing from Twitter to Google Reader

When I discover something via another’s tweet, and share that in Google Reader, I find it extremely difficult to attribute the source. Because Google Reader was not developed as a social app from the ground up, attribution is incredibly difficult. This is an element that I think has not been discussed in the dozens of blog posts surrounding the Google Reader vs. Twitter war. Twitter makes attribution very simple, Google Reader doesn’t.

There are many additional factors and complications involved when you bring Facebook into the discussion, which I will not discuss here.

Is Attribution Important?

It depends on you. I personally believe in Thanksgiving as a way of life, not something to be done once a year. Also, sharing your sources helps your network discover good sources, which in turn increases your relevance and influence as a curator of content. Your sources value your attribution and this positions you as a Trust Agent in their eyes.

This is how social media thrives and I try my best to practice attribution diligently. Sure, it takes additional effort, but then who said it was all easy?

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RSS: Really Smart Search

There has been a lot of discussion lately regarding whether people use RSS to track news. Rob Diana has summed up the discussion well in RSS, Human Filters and Real Time Streams.

What I am interested in is not tracking breaking news but being able to search for relevant information. Alex at ReadWriteWeb had pontificated about Social Relevancy Ranking in search results.

This is becoming increasingly important for me. Google search has no human filter, no personal trust factor. Alex Campbell writes about the stark realization that he doesn’t depend upon Google anymore to find stuff, where he describes how SEO has diminished Google’s relevancyGoogle Reader

Marshall Kirkpatrick had designed a Custom Google Search (“Marshall’s Magic Search”) that I have used quite a lot, until recently. Now, I find that my Google Reader gives me better results.

How and why?

  • Following the right people. This is the most challenging aspect, as Rob Diana says in his post. There is no built-in auto-discovery feature based on relevancy and not popularity. If the Facebook suggested friends feature could be applied to Google Reader, it would be one approach. But once you follow the thought leaders and influencers in your sphere of interest, you have already made your Google Reader search several relevancy levels higher than Google and dismissed SEO garbage and popularity noise in one fell swoop.
  • The beauty of RSS subscriptions is that searching feeds can go back indefinitely in time. This means in a feed reader like Google Reader, you can get search results from people (feeds) you follow even before you started following them. So if you subscribe to Louis Gray’s shared feed, you can search his “wisdom archives” so to speak, even if you didn’t know him till now.
  • You can get feeds from social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg if you want to add popularity as a factor in your search.
  • Organizing your feeds using folders and tags. This comes in very handy so that you can search selectively based on your folders and tags.
  • Using Starring. Many people do not use the Star feature in Google Reader. I use it as if they were my bookmarks.

Can Google Reader replace Google? No, since at present, Google Reader shows results in chronological order, supports primitive search operators and wildcards, and does not use a relevancy algorithm. There are simple limitations like needing to enclose a phrase in parenthesis and so on.

Steve Rubel has also highlighted the use of Google Reader as a database in his recent post. The effectiveness of the tool depends on how effectively you use it. The smarter you are, the smarter your Google Reader search results. There’s an indispensable human filter involved – and that is you.

However, these are limitations of the feed reader, not of RSS. Since it has a large user base, it is difficult for the Google Reader team to accelerate development of new features. On the other hand, new startups like LazyFeed and Toluu have developed an astonishing service within a very short time span. It might take these new services lesser time to add powerful search functions based on social rankings and personal follow lists. Marshall has revealed how they use open source software for meme tracking and feed parsing for ReadWriteWeb, including LazyFeed to monitor specific topics.

If these startups are able to capitalize on a smaller early adopter user base and bring smarter search results, do you think they can deliver smarter search results than Google and its Reader?

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Remove Duplicates in Google Reader

If you've recently started following a lot of people in Google Reader, you might have noticed a lot of duplicate items being shared.

I have experimented with a Greasemonkey user script that purports to remove duplicates. Some users have reported problems with the script's earlier versions, so I suggest you use caution if you decide to use it. You should backup your Reader subscriptions as an OPML file via Import/Export under Settings.

I have found that it is filtering my duplicates excellently so far. Install the Google Reader Filter script (you'll need Greasemonkey script support in your browser) and let me know if it works for you as well.

The script does more than filter duplicates. You can filter out unwanted content or highlight wanted content based on keywords. Pretty useful!

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My Simple Wish List for Google Reader

I'm spending a lot of time in Google Reader these days. There have been several improvements in the last few weeks in following, sharing, and commenting and I am grateful to the Google Reader team for these wonderful enhancements. As Jorge pointed out, With FriendFeed Out of the Way, Google Reader Has a Golden Opportunity.

To help it further on that way, here is my initial wish list for Google Reader:

1. Centralize All Settings (Incl. Sharing)
At present, most Reader settings are accessed via the Settings link at the top right. For some reason however, Sharing Settings are not included on this page. It would make sense to include these as well.

At present, they are accessible from within the main screens when you click certain sections like Shared Items or People You Follow.

2. Marking Items As Read Older Than Original Date
The new feature of marking items as read that are older than a day, a week, or two weeks work based on the date the item was shared. I would like an option to choose if I want it to be based on the date of the original item (news/blog post/etc.). Why?

I find that even if I'm keeping myself up-to-date with most of the popular stories shared within my community of tech enthusiasts, there are items being shared by people that are say 3 or 4 days old. Even if I filter them out by this new feature, these stale items persist in my unread feed since they were shared just now by others. This makes the feature less powerful than it can be.

3. Eliminate Duplicate Shares
I find that sometimes Reader is able to detect duplicate items in my shared feed, and shows a consolidated "Shared by 3" item. However, many times, this detection doesn't work and I have multiple instances of the same item in my feed.

I checked if this happens only if there is a new/separate comment for each shared item, but that is not the case. I checked if this happens when I've already launched Reader and new items are added after I'm already within Reader. No, it happens when I launch Reader afresh. So the dup-detection needs polishing.

4. One-Click Send To
The current implementation of Send To opens up new browser tabs/windows, and feels very rudimentary. Feedly, for e.g. allows you to tweet or share in FriendFeed with a single click. Reader should allow me to configure my sharing accounts and enable 1-click Send To.

5. Map Shared Folders to Contact Groups
I can organize my feeds in folders and contacts in groups. One would think it makes sense that I would like to share specific folders of feeds with specific groups of people. Unfortunately, that is not the case, or I haven't understood Reader's sharing settings at all.

At present, I can mark each of my folders to be shared or not shared. I can globally set my shared items to be public or shared with groups. This means, each of my shared folders is shared with each of the groups I select.

What would make more sense is to let me share tech stuff with my tech group, arts with my artist friends, and so on.

6. Global Mark as Read
Many people in my tech enthusiast community read and share the same items. After I have read an item from the original source feed, and even shared it myself, I again see the same item as unread in my following feed.

When I mark an item as Read, it should be marked as Read in my following feed as well. The only exception to this is when the shared item has a comment to it.

At the rate at which the Google Reader team is making enhancements, I don't think these tweaks should take long for them to implement? If you like these suggestions, please share/re-tweet this so the message reaches the team!

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