Google Now Allows You To Pick Your Friends in Reader

Last year, Google caused a bit of a furor when it expanded the sharing capabilities of Google Reader, the company’s service for viewing blogs. The main complaint was that Google assumed that anyone you had exchanged messages with using Google Talk was your friend. If those people were Google Reader users, they would be able to see any item you marked as “shared.”

The feature surprised even tech-savvy users of Reader, who said they had no idea who had access to the blog items they marked as shared.

Now Google has acknowledged its faux pas and has given users more control over the people they share blog items with in Reader.