The Last Podcast

The fact that Google Reader now allows you to share any webpage in Google Reader through a bookmarklet (how many bookmarklets do you have installed already, btw?) and with the revolutionary feature of adding notes to that is, in too many ways, yet another example of Google reinventing wheels it already has (and just adding functionality that had been hacked into it already anyway).

Google already has a note-taking application and it is far superior: Google Notebook. It does a million things better than Google Reader for sharing notes.  You can share the notebooks, other users can comment on items, you can add pictures and tags, it has RSS feeds you can subscribe to (and hence add to your shared feeds if you are so inclined), there is a Firefox extension that gives you direct access to your notes from a small pop-up.

The Google Reader notes function is simply another example of what happens far too often with Google products these days (and not just at Google, I might add). Already existing apps linger while another group reinvents the wheel instead of integrating these different apps with each other (think Google Talk and GrandCentral).

Besides that, the fact that these posts shared through the bookmarklet are not de-duplicated (as Robert Scoble has already pointed out to anybody who would listen), isn’t really helping keeping noise down at all.