Wronglabel

Google’s got a slew of new features in their RSS reader. One, in particular, is the ability to mark a post with a piece of binary metadata: that you liked it. And beyond marking, you get to see via the others using Google Reader, who else liked it (and the names of any of your contacts who liked it).

Google stores metadata, then, about every entry that comes through their RSS reader. This isn’t a novel observation. Google stores just about everything that touches the internet in some form or another. But it’s a pointed reaffirmation that even the most subjective of information–something that doesn’t, actually, touch the internet, is of use, and is beginning to be tracked.

Prior to this feature launch, you could share an RSS item. Sharing, however, doesn’t imply liking.

And after sharing, you could comment on what you shared. All the easier to say, “I share this because I disagree so entirely with it. I loathe this. And I want you all, my Google contacts who also use Google Reader, to know that I loathe it.”

And after sharing with a note, other contacts were then given the ability to comment on a shared post. Which is great. But the data seems so much more interesting than something that should only be shared with your incestuous circle of Google Reader contacts. I’d want my comment to be piped directly to the blog posts comments. And I’d want the RSS feed for those comments piped straight into Google Reader’s comments view on that blog. Simple stuff here, Google! Get with the idiosyncratic program!

But the most recent feature, liking, is so mundane. It’s so bizarre to come to the computer late in the afternoon, open Google Reader, and see that somebody else, out there in the vast-but-quickly-shrinking-world, likes the blog post that I’m about to read.

What if I don’t like it? Will Google implement a dislike button for me? Presumably I could do this on my own–a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, in fact, that sends data about individual blog posts to a server of my own design. Users of the script would all communicate on a non-Google darknet, their distaste not even necessarily shared by others users reading the same post. But publicly registered distaste, no less–you’ll see that I don’t like this post, whoever you are. You’ll see it and you’ll know. 260 people liked it, 4 people disliked it. 4 rebellious hackers who are the only people to observe each others’ dissent.

Someone (probably many people) have already concocted Greasemonkey scripts to remove the display of people liking a blog post from Google Reader. For a moment I considered installing it, hesitating only because I seem to actually care about the opinions of unknowable people half a world away.

I mean, I’m reading blog posts, as it is.