Over the last year, Google has been receiving increased pressure to become a real-time search engine, something like Technorati and Twitter. They certainly have the lead in public content search (and advertising) over the Internet but a threatening amount of private and user information have started to surface behind the great wall of Facebook. Research publications strongly people often rely on word of mouth or recommendations from other people to make their decisions. Although, Google's core strength is search (and lots of math), there is a lot of progress to be done on the social front.
A few hours ago and as reported by TechCrunch and Mashable, Google Reader received a significant upgrade which allowed following, liking and people searching. You are not the only one to automatically see the link to Twitter and Facebook. However, they seem to have set the default sharing method to public while offering the option of sharing only between friends. In the past they have enabled a feature that allowed sharing but was unfortunately set to share by default to selected groups which may not have granted the best success.
A few points of criticism can already be made: read more »
