Google is huge; an internet giant. They’ve created an online empire of monolithic proportions while still catering to the “little guys” in a way that many multi-billion dollar companies often fail to do. While not everything they touch turns into gold, their hands certainly seem to ooze that golden goodness. However, Google has recently employed a new feature for their RSS feed reader, the Google Reader, which has its users up in arms – leaving Google with the equivalent of a corporate black eye.

What Google has done, in essence, is taken their ever-popular Google Reader and turned it into a large-scale social networking tool, without so much as giving any advanced-warning to its users. Instead of a users RSS feeds being shared with a few select friends, these feeds are now being shared with friends, family members, employers, employees, other business contacts and one-time contacts that are stored within the users Gmail account and Google Talk account.

From the verbiage on the Google help center topic on this newest feature it seems that Google is pleased with their latest update. However, taking even a small peek at some of the comments on the Google Groups thread announcing this new feature you’ll see users describing this change in their own words:

“This is the worst feature you [Google] have ever introduced….”

“This is a terrible idea… a violation of privacy, and it contradicts your own [Google’s] documentation…”

“…I want a way to turn this off immediately.”

“I'm going to stop using Google Reader if they don't fix this SOON.”

And, this only covers a few of the almost 300 responses to this new feature, which most of them don’t look upon this new feature as something to be desired.

This updated by Google not only erodes a sense of privacy that users thought they had, this update potentially could cause problems with business associates and cause embarrassment for users with their friends and family. Truth be told, things that are shared with a close and personal friend are not always suitable to be shared with parents, acquaintances or employer… but Google seems to think otherwise.