Is there something you’d like to share?

I stopped using Twitterfeed a couple of days ago. I had been using it to tweet my shared items from Google Reader.

There were a couple of reasons I quit using it, the least of which was the delay between my sharing the item in GReader and its appearing in Twitter. I never knew when a post I shared would be tweeted and for some reason that bothered me. I think I was afraid that I’d be in the middle of a really witty exchange someday and be interrupted by some asinine thing that hours prior I’d thought was worth showing around (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

But the main thing that made me dump Twitterfeed was the lack of context. Soon after I found out that it would tweet just the (shortened) link preceded by the headline I found that my sharing behaviour changed. For a number of days I shared only posts whose value was self-evident.

I told myself I was actually becoming a more selective GReader sharer, that the quality of my feed was improved for having the burden of a larger subsidiary audience. But this was not actually true.

What I’d become was a highly impersonal sharer, pointing at posts but saying nothing while at the same time trying to limit my sharing only to posts whose value was self-evident. In short, I had become intentionally obvious, which is a polite way of saying “boring”.

The value of GReader isn’t just the eclectic mix of posts you get to read by following your friends and others who share what they’re reading. It’s the ability to easily editorialize that makes it so compelling. Because GReader users can comment on the stories they share (and on the stories their friends share) they’re able to offer more than just a cool link: they’re offering context in which to appreciate the value of that link.

Seeing someone’s GReader shares through Twitterfeed is like watching Seth Godin give a talk without the sound on. You can see he’s saying something, but you’re constantly wondering, “Why are you showing me this?”