Previously in this series we discussed the user interface advancement of collapsing emails in the same thread together, and how that can help to deal with a high volume of incoming email. It's worth asking whether this is really a solution unto itself, or if it is maybe just a way to cope with a bigger problem, that of attention fragmentation.

Have you ever found yourself having multiple conversations with the same person (or group of people) at the same time? Most often this will happen in email; you find yourself quickly writing a reply to one thread, and as you send your reply you notice a new update to a different thread from the same correspondent. It also sometimes happens in instant messaging programs, or even social networking sites - and often all of these at the same time. Is this truly more efficient than speaking to people either face-to-face or over the phone? Is it even healthy?

The topic of email as it relates to health is top-of-mind this week, due to a very in-depth article published at the Huffington Post by Linda Stone, titled Just Breathe: Building the Case for Email Apnea, which was highlighted by Robert Scoble. Linda Stone, if you're not familiar with her name, has been an executive at both Apple and Microsoft, and was the person that coined the term "continuous partial attention". Continuous partial attention refers to the way in which we attempt to multi-task, but really end up only giving a fraction of our attention to any one task, project, or conversation. Linda argues that we end up accomplishing less, damaging relationships, and generally accomplishing the opposite of what we intended when we practice continuous partial attention.

A few weeks ago Google launched a new feature that makes Google Reader a bit more social. Whenever you mark an item as "Shared," your Gmail/Google Talk contacts will be able to find that article by following a new "Friends' shared items" link in Google Reader.

Now here's the thing: Google Reader shared items have always been available to the public. But in order to find a shared item feed you need to enter a rather complicated string of characters in your web browser's URL bar. The result is that you're probably not going to find anyone's shared items unless they give you a link. Some people have made their shared items available to the public buy putting a link on their blog. Robert Scoble is famously almost as proud of his "link blog," as he is of his actual blog. But other readers assumed they had some level of privacy and only shared items with a handful of friends.

Now that anyone you've ever corresponded with over Google Talk can see your shared items, you might be a bit more careful of what you share. And some people aren't particularly pleased with that situation.

Is the new Google Reader shared items feature an invasion of privacy? We're going to go out on a limb here and say no. If you don't want the whole world to see your shared items, there's an easy answer: don't click the share button. But we can imagine plenty of situations where you would want to share some stories with the whole world and other stories with just a select group of people. Or where you might want to be able to differentiate between "friends," and family, colleagues or other people who might not find some of your shared items so amusing.

So while we don't think Google necessarily did anything wrong by adding this feature, we don't really understand why the feature is one size fits all. There's no option for users to opt out of having their items shared other than to stop sharing items at all. And there's no way to share your items with some friends, but not others.

What do you think? Is the new Google Reader friends' shared items feature a privacy violation or just a poorly implemented attempt to make RSS reading a more social experience?

Update: The author of the original article wrote in to let us know that it's moved. Same article, new URL.

[via Scobleizer]