Share, dammit.

While the world of sharing and the increase of software that will allow everyone to see what you're doing all the time is a little creepy in some sense, it has some great advantages. I often feel much closer to the people who use the social tools. In personal conversations and emails, you often mostly get the big updates and the larger conversations. But it's in the Facebook updates or the del.icio.us feed or the occasional blog posts that you get to see the small parts of a friend's life: what they're enjoying or thinking about beyond just the big events.

One of my favorites of this software is the shared items in Google Reader. With a single click (or Shift-S), you mark a story as Shared and then people who subscribe to it can see what you're into. In the year or so that I've been using Reader, some of the most fascinating articles I've read have been through other people's shared feeds.

So I was thrilled to see Google's new feature where they've integrated your friends from the Gmail chat into your reader. So no more having to ask people what their shared page is before you can see what you're sharing. If they're in your address book and they use Google Reader, you can see their shared items.

If you're using Google Reader, get to sharing. Anything that you think is interesting, hit the button. I certainly want to know what's striking your interest.

But I still want to say this means I'm not still mad at Google for the ridiculous non-update of Analytics last week, where they left in everything that was flawed about the tool, but changed the code that makes it suck. I've taken off the "I ♥ Google" bumper sticker on my car.