Do Not Share this in Google Reader

I think that it is finally time to begin the war with google reader. 

Granted, google reader is a fine content aggregator, and has perhaps done “too good” of a job. It seems like now no one actually reads sites anymore. And, why should you if you can get full post contents aggregated for you all uniformly displayed and ready for consumption at your leisure. As a result, actual click through to sites has been plummeting. I personally don’t have any ads on my site, so it really is not a huge deal for me. However, the new comments feature has seriously throw a wrench into things.

When google reader added comments is completely eliminated the need to actually visit sites. Now you can read entire posts, and comment on them without having to leave your current frame. Unfortunately, this is a sad and sorry substitute for the read thing.

Here are the primary issues I see with comments in google reader:

• Narrow Scope – you post a comment to an item shared in google reader, and it might as well be flushed down the toilet, because the only people that are going to read it are your friends that haven’t yet read the shared item.
• Lack of Notification – you can share out an item, and have all your friends comment on it, and never know unless you militantly go back into your shared items to look for comments on them.
• Death of Discussion – since no one knows you commented, unless you did so before they read the posts it is very unlikely they would respond to your comments. And, even if they did respond you could not continue the conversation because you would not know that they responded. Thus, what’s the point?

I may, as an act of solitary defiance begin truncating my RSS feed to only include excerpts of my posts, thus forcing people to get back into the habit of actually viewing their friend’s sites and spurring on discussions, as is the point of these blogs we are all keeping these days.

Update:

I am not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but you can see that comments are also segregated based on which instance of the shared article they were placed on. I suppose that I should at least be happy that they are grouping them together.