Since I’m full of the milk of human kindness after a wonderful Christmas, I’ve been trying to remain calm in the face of all the Google Reader hysteria about shared items and so on — but wiping out on some ice yesterday and landing on my ass has made it hard to stay serene (combined with gashing my hand playing Wii baseball), so I can’t help pointing out that much of the moaning about “privacy” is just ridiculous.

Like Stan over at Mashable, I’m wondering what part of the word “shared” isn’t being understood in that whole scenario. Are the humans who are complaining non-English speakers? That seems unlikely. So the concept of “sharing” items on your Google Reader must be one they are at least glancingly familiar with. Scoble has decided to take the high road and blame Google for not implementing ‘granular privacy controls’ — and that might be a good thing for Reader, just as it would be for Facebook.

But it’s not something that’s essential, in my opinion, nor is it something Google should be slammed for not having. The company

explained that shared items would be visible to GTalk contacts — pretty simple, in my opinion. Plus, they can only be seen by contacts who plus use Google Reader, and those contacts have to specifically visit on the shared items from other users to see them. It’s not as whether they’re being emailed to your friends, or scrolling by on the Jumbotron.

Would GPC be handy to have? certain. Would a better contact management system be good? No doubt. But whether you want to keep something private in Reader, but still save it for later, there’s a simple way of doing that: use the “Star” operate. The word “share” means precisely what it implies. In case anyone is interested, my shared items are here. They may not be as interesting as Scoble’s, but they’re the best I can do (they’re in the sidebar of my blog as well, via a Reader widget).

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Orginal post by Mathew