With Google users growing more irate by a sharing feature on its Google Reader service, the search giant is making moves to appease the masses.

The drama began on December 14 when Google announced that Reader, its RSS feed service, would connect with Google Talk and Gmail contacts. In other words, when users tagged a feed to “Share” in Reader the users’ Gmail and Google Talk contacts would see it.

The uproar arose nearly immediately, as industry analysts and consumers alike expressed their displeasure. In fact, the Google Reader forum offers 277 comments on the Share feature since it launched. Not all of them were negative, but most of them ranged from reasonably annoyed to extremely angered.

Comments and Questions

“Don’t you think there might be a method of being selective with what you share that might be slightly more fine grained than, you know, deleting our shared items en masse? that is the worst ‘feature’

you have ever introduced,” wrote a Google Reader Help poster named “Modulo Noh.”

Many had the same question: How do I turn that off? “Do I need to unsubscribe from all my feeds? I do *NOT* want colleagues seeing my personal feeds. Unless I’m misunderstanding something here, I have to stop using Google Reader,” wrote a user by the name of LeeWNYC.

Chrix Finne, the Google spokesperson who blogs about the Reader, fielded the questions in one overarching blog post. He first acknowledged the “helpful feedback” about the new sharing feature. thereupon he admitted that the company had hoped making it easier to share feeds with humans they chat with frequently would be useful and interesting.

“We underestimated the number of users who were using the Share button to send stories to a limited number of society. We’re looking at ways to prepare sharing more granular and flexible, but…

Orginal post by Top Tech News