After some generally poor performance from NetNewsWire's NewsGator syncing today, I decided to take another look at Google Reader. The OPML export from NetNewsWire to Google Reader went perfectly. The next step was to read a few items in Google Reader and share them. Done. Next, I went to Facebook and added the application and gave it my userid so it could find the feed for my shared items. Finally, I checked out the shared items of my Friends (none) and my Networks (some.)

I can finally understand some of the hype this has been getting. I can't imagine I would find it all that meaningful if I had a network as large as Scoble's. However, I can see where, with a much more directed network, it could be very useful. At work, a group of us use particular tags and feeds and Yahoo! Pipes to provide a list of interesting things we'd like to share. This avoids the messy email issue of lots of emailed links.

The Facebook application addresses the same problem, but more easily and with dynamic group membership. If a user chooses to add the application and share their links, they'll be shared with the group. What's more, there is a means to measure the popularity of links. It's the sort of thing I think might make TWEN suck less.

What's missing at this stage? A feed of my network's shared links. I don't want to go into Facebook to read feeds. Any feeds. The application advertises that it's still in beta, and I hope an eventual feature is the addition of feeds of the shared links from the various networks and friends.