Nick Vidal

I was very pleased with Google’s recent feature, where they converged the aggregator (Google Reader) with I.M. (Google Talk). Steadily, Google’s services are converging.

So what’s next? If you read the feedback they’ve received from users, you’ll notice the common complaint:

“Don’t you think there might be a method of being selective with what you share that might be slightly more fine grained…?”

Despite having liked the new feature, I immediately removed friends’ feeds from appearing in my aggregator. Why? Because I’m not interested in receiving everything that my friends share, just some things.

This is where ISS (Instant Syndicating Standards) comes in. The advantages of Google adopting ISS are:

• the display of a tagcloud for each contact will help people become aware of friends’ interests more easily;
• people will be able to subscribe to exactly what they want to read from their friends;
• it will promote information-sharing in the long tail;
• it will add personalization and trust;
• it’s a non-obtrusive solution.

Adopting ISS will not require a major shift in Google’s current system. The use of tags is already part of Google Reader and Google Talk already uses XMPP.

I can clearly see how ISS may be adopted to help Google Reader, Talk, Gmail, Orkut, Blogger and Jaiku converge. I hope they’ll take notice at ISS. And not only Google, but others as well. ISS is an open standard that may be adopted by anyone interested.

ISS was created as a result from a careful study about information-sharing. Its goal is to bring people closer together to discuss common interests and share information in a more open and democratic manner.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 7:06 pm and is filed under google, iss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.