As expected Google’s announcement yesterday of Knol; their Wikipedia wannabe, has pretty well dominated much of today’s hot discussion points with people hopping on bandwagons for either side of the project’s eventual success or not; with more than a few folks saying this is going to be a space changer.

Well as much as I doubt that will be the case Google did something today that I do think is going to be a major influence on the whole social networking environment. It might seem like not much but it in fact could be the real space changing move made by Google.

What they did was so simple, so subtle that many may not realize the implications of what they did. People like Steve Rubel and ParisLemon do though and as Steve said:

It’s brilliant because, in the process, Google will turn every service from one that is static to something social.

So what did Google do?

Simply put - the Google Reader team enabled a new feature called Friends - which in reality is nothing more than your Gmail contact list; or addressbook, and with that all your friends can see what you are sharing through Reader and in turn they can see what you are sharing. In effect you now have a complete blog network operating out of Google Reader. As MG Siegler at ParisLemon says:

Google Reader is my single most-used app beyond email. However looking at my friends from my contact list who are also on Google Reader, it appears only a few are sharing items. I definitely believe this social Google Reader can be very powerful if networked together correctly - potentially even much more powerful than Digg and the like. Lets start using these Google Profiles and sharing with each other!

Sometimes it really is the little things that can have the greatest impact and I think this is one of those times even though I am not a Google Reader or even a GMail user.

Listening to: Blondie - Beautiful: The Remix Album - Union City Blue (Diddy’s Power And Passion Mix)

Conversation Tags: Google, Google Reader, social networks