No one has yet come up with an email client that I am aware of where you read a “river of email” with the ability to share jokes with your whole address book with a single hotkey.

Wouldn’t it be faster to read your email that way?

But there are dangers, you might share a private email.

Some RSS feeds are also private, there needs to be respect for built in controls.

This is of course a problem when it comes to privacy, and fundamentally I do not see a idiot-proof solution.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, what if someone re-wrote your private feed on their public blog? Or even re-write in with a pen on a paper (Yes they still exist!)? You can’t do anything against that. So, if there is information you don’t want spread, do not spread it in the first place.

How would this be handled in the real world? Via trust, not by any technical restrictions (“hey, I can tell you my secret, because I trust you, but it will be DRM forward locked!” is not how reality goes)

Trust would work equally well for electronic data: if you share data with people you trust not to re-share it by purpose, and also by accident! Of course there is also the technology to trust here, but that is generally easier to trust than humans today in my opinion. Of course, people that honestly do not want to share private is going to do so by mistake from time to time, but that applies equally well to the real world! The issue here, as this blog is really touching upon, is we need to make the electronic world a lot more like the physical world, ie. a lot harder to share information.

So, what is left of the problem? Absolutely nothing. Don’t send your valued data to sloppy people or public channels!

Lisa Barone posted today about being surprised to discover that some of her Facebook activities were showing up in Bloglines. How? She’s friends with John Harmon, and his Facebook notifications feed was apparently submitted over there. The odd thing i…

Facebook has controls built in, Bloglines created those controls 13 months ago.

Google Reader not only ignores the controls, it strips them out along with any controls added by their sister Feedburner service.

It is also interesting to note that Robert signed up for the Open Social Web, but today was writing about how he is tied to Google Reader, locked in, because he can’t extract his historical feed data to move to another service.

It is also important to think of legal issues.

If you by a license to an image for use on your site, you can probably also publish it in your feed to your subscribers, because that is still you using it.
If someone then republishes it somewhere else, they are breaking copyright.

That person wouldn’t know, because the copyright information that was in the original feed was stripped out.

Just do a search for how many people are even aware that this extension exists.

It is almost like there is a conspiracy in San Francisco to hide the information. A “nip slip” from a “C” celebrity would get a lot more attention, even among tech bloggers.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reblogging provided the original source is cited. Even if their feed is protected, it’s easy enough to go to their website, pull a few quotes from the article and blog about it on your site.

It’s not so easy to get into someone else’s Facebook account and see all their private information.

Just kidding! I’m actually wondering what your answer to Robert’s other question is, Andy.

A new video, apparently leaked and intended to orient new Googlers about the Google Reader application, has shed some new light on Google’s plans in the feed and social space, as well as providing some stats on Google Reader itself. Leaked Google Vide…