I am a bit late to this party as I was away all day yesterday at a wedding but upon logging into my Google Reader today, I noticed that they have rolled out a new feature - being able to view shared items from your Gmail / Google Talk friends.

This is unmistakably a direct salvo at Stumbleupon and Digg which are basically groups of people getting together and sharing links. As Steve Rubel points out in his blog post, Google is approaching social networks from another angle - instead of launching a copy-cat competitor, they are instead leveraging the power of your Gmail address book by integrating your contacts into other Google products. This is a smart move but there are flaws in the plan if Google is serious about launching a Stumble-style competitor.

The basic flaw is that in order to share links, your Gmail friends need to use Google Reader.  Reader is the vehicle that connects you and the friend and sends the links back and forth. Setting up a Reader account requires a knowledge and interest of RSS feeds, how to set them up, how to use them effectively, etc. Now I have a lot of Gmail friends who are on Stumbleupon but stumbling doesn’t involve a knowledge of RSS. You just click the stumble button, leave a comment then hit that stumble button again. Easy.

But off the top of my head, I know of at least half a dozen intelligent friends who wouldn’t know what RSS was even if it came up and handed them a business card. So for people to embrace this new feature, Google is obviously hoping that these same people will take the time to do a tutorial in RSS and then have the interest to keep going, reading feeds, hitting the share button.    I can right away see my uncle just shaking his head and thinking “sod it, I’ll just email Mark the link!”

With all due respect to internet users worldwide, not everybody is an online genius and not everybody uses RSS. Those people are going to continue to use Stumbleupon or Digg or just email links to people, like they did before. Why? Because it’s easier and people like easy. I’ve lost count the number of time I have had to explain the RSS concept to my girlfriend - and she isn’t stupid. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just simply something that she can’t grasp because it’s not a subject she’s remotely interested in.

But even if you are a genius in RSS, what if you don’t use Reader to read your feeds?    What if you prefer My Yahoo or Bloglines?    Google is then doing a Microsoft in that they are forcing people to only use their tools and abandon everyone else if they want to do something.    Stumbleupon and Digg don’t force you to switch to new email addresses and new RSS readers to use their services.    Google is.

But then here’s the next problem which is going to sink this feature before it even gets out of beta - to view a friend’s shared feeds, that person has to be in your Google Talk contact list! So not only do you have to take a course in RSS (or switch feed readers), you also have to set up Google Talk, then build and maintain a contact list. Great if you’re a chatter but not so great if you think chatting online is only for teenagers and lonely singles.    But what if you ARE a chatter but you don’t like Google Talk?    What if you’re more of a Yahoo Messenger or ICQ type of guy / gal?   Tough cheese amigo.

Then as the Google Operating System points out, the feature doesn’t filter out duplicates. So what if your Gmail / GReader friends read the same feeds as you? You’ll end up with multiple copies of the same posts which will make it harder to a) find the good stuff and b) keep your feeds under control in a manageable way.

Combine all these issues together and I can see this feature not making it out of the beta stables.    By closely integrating all the Google products together like this, it has ensured that the only people really using this new feature will be the true hard-core Googlers, the ones that use everything that Google brings out.      But if you cherry-pick which Google products to use, you might find yourself out of the loop with this new feature.    Google is telling you that it’s not OK to have a Gmail address but use Yahoo’s feed reader.    They want to own you 100%.   Which might be good for the shareholders but for users, it’s not really fair.