Just as I suspected, Google wasted little time in addressing the ‘Friends’ Shared Items’ mess going on with Google Reader. In a post just now they admit that they made a mistake in assuming how users were using the ‘Share’ functionality on Reader and promise they are working on a system that is “more granular and flexible”.

In the meantime they’ve rundown the steps you can take to share only select items – just as Steve Rubel did earlier today – and once again give instructions on how to clear your shares. Interestingly you can also apparently move your shares from the public shared folder to a specific shared tag – not sure if this is old or a new function thrown together just for this, but I haven’t noticed that before.

No big surprise here that Google went against its earlier position of basically telling the users they were idiots (which is at least somewhat true, I know from personal experience). If something doesn’t make sense to a user it doesn’t matter if you are right, you are wrong. I still think this is fundamentally a problem with the way Google wants to handle the social net it is casting over all of its apps – you can’t just assume people are friends with one another because they’ve talked before.

You just knew this would get solved quickly, the potential here it too huge and the ramifications too large with all of Google’s social goals for them to completely screw this up right off the bat.

Google asks that we please keep our “feedback coming”. Which is a nice way of saying “alright, enough already, we hear you!”.

[UPDATE]: Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins in his post on this for Mashable astutely adds the quotation marks around Google’s own “helpful comment” phrase and notes that he’s found the new social features “slightly disappointing” and “less than useful”, which is exactly why Google needed to nip this so quickly. They can do a lot of potential cool social things with this, but first they need to make sure the ’social’ part works.