My favorite RSS feed reader and jumping off point for information discovery and sharing, Google Reader, has caught the social bug. Fresh off their big push last month that saw a spike in the number of people exchanging shared items and finding contacts, Mountain View issued a code bump this evening that lets you take your shared items and send them to a myriad of social networks, including Delicious, Facebook, Twitter and others.In their blog post tonight, Reader said they have been "thinking about ways to help our users better share, discover, and consume content in Reader." Share is the big word with this move. Now, each item I share, and I share about 20 day, can be sent to one of my favorite social networks.
Now I Can Send Shares To Multiple Networks
If My Favorite Is Not There, I Can Make My Own
In addition to this move, Reader made it easier to find more feeds from people you are following, by leveraging their Google profile. Now, if I have feeds on my blog, and my Twitter and my Facebook or any other network, Google will find it and make it available, through the "People You Follow" area. At this point, following almost 400 people, I should be able to find a few hundred new things to consume.
One Person: Many Feed Opportunities
Another thought is ... with Facebook gobbling up FriendFeed, I could now follow all my friends' updates here in Google Reader instead. Google Reader could be a master aggregation service even if not all the community functions are there. Who knows?
The last major update from the Reader team today? More capability to mark items read, including options older than a day, week or two weeks. Considering I never mark all as read, I'll skip this "feature" but for those of you who embrace information consumption failure, you might find it tempting.