Google Reader… sharing and such.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under google, nerdly, reader, social
Oh google
Sometimes you piss me off with how you tease me.
As you might have heard (it’s all over the interwebs!) google integrated shared items with your friends. Like this social networking thing I’ve heard so much about…
Which is cool.
I mean, I’ve been reading certain friend’s shared items for a while now… but it’s cool that it’s so much easier to do it…
…only it’s not.
Now here’s the rub. The three people whose shared items I actually want to see everyday are not my friends.
Wait, what?
That’s not right. I’d venture that they are three of the people I talk to the most…
But, according to google, they aren’t my friends. (um… fuck you google, I’m self conscious enough as it is…)
So I checked out that handy link to “manage friends” and it said I had to be able to chat with my friends…
WTF?
So, I chatted (via google f’n chat…) with Harper about why he had friends and I didn’t (at least as far google is concerned…)
I was bothered all day about this.
While I was pissed about my lack of online friends (how sad…) I had an interesting conversation with Atkins and Harper about how anyone that would want to be taken seriously in the tech arena can’t really use a “major carrier” email address. detour@detour1999.com makes me more real (like in real life…) than detour1999@gmail.com. So, yeah… detour@detour1999.com is me on the interwebs…
And, I’m not an idiot… so I’m using google apps for email etc. Why? ’cause I love integration.
Most of my friends are the same way… they have their own domains and they (generally) have google apps handling the email (and here’s here this sideline starts to make sense) and thereby, the chat.
Now, in general we all have (one or several) domains and emails (usually collected into one main account), and a couple of jabber accounts… and 1 google account that is generally used ONLY for reader and google code. Why, because you need a google account for each of those things.
Oh, shit. That’s why I have no friends….
Yeah, google kicked some ass with integration. I can chat all day long with Harper or Bryan, but their not my friends… because I’m chatting with the wrong version of them.
So, yeah. I have no friends because even though me and all my friends all use google as the back bone for our online communication, apparently we are using the wrong flavor.
So, what the fuck was the selling point of google apps for domains? Oh, right… integration.
Well, realistically, I have 4+ (or something like that) google accounts. (work, this, a couple other sites, my companies site, my google account)… apparently integration isn’t a big deal there.
SHORT VERSION:
Google Reader will only recognize friends that you can chat with google account to google account.
Seriously… why can’t I associate my other google apps accounts with my main google account?