Dylan Richard talks about stuff.

I've been thinking a lot about google reader and the sharing fiasco over the past couple of days. It seems to me that the new sharing feature doesn't really work for anyone. For some, (who communicate primarily through their @gmail.com account) it was way too easy to share with their contacts [NB: I said "Contacts" not "Friends", that's a rather important semantic distinction.] For others (who don't really use their @gmail.com address as their main email address) it became a series of emailing actual friends for their @gmail.com account. Personally, I had already bothered my friends once (a while back) for their shared items address... I didn't need to bother them again for their gmail address. In theory, better integration of friend's shared items is an awesome idea. I was (and still am to an extent) incredibly excited about it. The problem is in the definition of friend. The criteria for "Friend"ship in google reader is the ability to chat user@gmail.com to user@gmail.com. That ability comes about either by explicitly choosing to allow chat between users; or by exchanging emails. That is really the core problem with google's implementation. Conjecture. I've been wrestling with the idea for a while. In my mind, google's implementation is based on flawed logic, but that flawed logic seemed to stem directly from trying too hard to apply DRY principles. Say I had a dataset representing a person. I wouldn't want to store both birthdate AND age. Age can conclusively be inferred by birthdate. Say I had a dataset representing social interaction. I wouldn't want to store social connectivity if it can be inferred from existing data, right? In this case, no. Given the age example, age can ALWAYS be calculated given a birthdate. Friendship can NOT be calculated based on email exchange. For example, 60% of my "friends", according to google reader, are people I have bought used volkswagen parts from. Exchanging emails about buying used headlights does not infer friendship. Interaction, yes. Friendship, no. Inference is good practice. Conjecture is not. If you can't get reproducible results ALWAYS (or at the very least, most of the time) it's not inference... it's conjecture.

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?