News and social networking: Google Reader conversations and launch of MeeHive

Posted by Emma Heald on March 12, 2009 at 3:11 PM

Google has just added a comments section to its Reader service: making it "your new watercooler," according to the Google Reader Blog. Previously, readers could add a comment if they shared an article, but users could not start a conversation. VentureBeat described the new feature as "the crucial missing ingredient."

Venturebeat writer Anthony Ha believes that this is "a big step towards turning Google Reader into a real social news service, that may eventually compete more directly with sites like socialmedian and MeeHive." He does, however, see a downside to this expansion of Google Reader's scope: the fact that "this only increases the fragmentation of online discussions," as many people already use more than one social network to link to or comment on news articles. He suggests a service called UberVu, described by VentureBeat as "a one-stop shop for dealing with all of the online content you create," to keep track of discussions.

MeeHive, mentioned above, launched yesterday, offering personalised news and the chance to connect with other users and see what they are interested in. As well as letting the reader choose what topics they are interested in, each user's personalised site has a 'Friends' Activity' feed, showing what other contacts are doing on the site, such as recommending articles.

As social networking pulls ahead of email in terms of the amount of time spent on sites by Internet users, it seems to make sense to add a networking element to news reading. However, from the point of view of newspaper publishers, these sites could have a similar effect to other aggregators: that is, reducing the amount of time that readers spend on newspaper websites themselves, and hence potentially reducing advertising revenue.

Source: Google Reader Blog, VentureBeat