GR Team,

As you know, I’ve been putting your product up against Bloglines in some side-by-side testing to see which Reader should become my one and only. And as much as a I like my river of data, there is a glaring problem with it.

One of the best features of GR is the ability to share the items that I read with others and they with me. In fact, that’s the main reason why I started using it in the first place - a buddy of mine started sharing his reading list (which is when I started using GR) then, Scoble started sharing his ‘link blog’ and I found that a very compelling reason to use GR more heavily. I’ve since increased my usage and the number of shared feeds I subscribe to - and therein lies the problem. I’ve got a couple feeds that overlap completely in their theme (web analytics) and overlap greatly in their shared content. Can you see where I’m going here?

It’s VERY annoying to have to look at the same post two or more times. Presumably these posts have some sort of unique identifier (post id, or URL even) that you could key on and then only show it me once - right? You could use the fact that it is in multiple feeds to indicate that it has a relatively higher authority or some such, but please, only show it to me once. if I like the post and want to follow up on it, I’ll star it so I can come back to it later.

Besides the annoyance of having to scan through the same post multiple times it’s also skewing the personal reading stats that your keeping tabs on about me - accuracy is key!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 11:38 am and is filed under google reader. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.