Google Reader Gets Way More Social With New Sharing Features

This story is near and dear to my heart: Google Reader has added a bunch of features to make sharing items more social and much easier.

The biggest addition, which makes Google Reader sharing a lot more like saving something to del.icio.us or submitting it to Digg, is a new bookmarklet so you can share any web page in Google Reader. This isn’t actually completely new – I’ve previously described a third-party bookmarklet that does something similar – but now that it’s being officially offered by Google Reader, adoption is going to surge. This bookmarket is also a lot easier to use than the third-party app, which required some knowledge of Google Reader’s interface. Also, the Google Reader bookmarklet lets you add any web page to your shared items, not just items with an RSS feed. This means Google Reader sharing can now include a lot more than just news sites and blogs, and makes the act of sharing items even more similar to submitting something to a social news site.

Another new feature you’ll notice when sharing an item with the new bookmarklet is the ability to attach a note to your shared items. This allows you to tell your Google contacts why you find the story interesting. This feature can also be accessed within Google Reader, via a “Share With Note” link that appears next to the traditional “share” link with each item. You can also post notes that aren’t associated with any item at all - somewhat akin to posting a message on FriendFeed.

One other welcome change is that shared items now have a distinctive look inside Google Reader. This alleviates at least some of the duplicate items problem, in that you can now see that an item isn’t just showing up repeatedly, but rather, it’s being shared by your friends. A few other small upgrades are noted on the Google Reader team blog.

One big disclosure here: as you might know, my side project ReadBurner is based on aggregating data from Google Reader shared items. Combined with my passion for RSS and feed reading, I’m probably a bit more excited about these features than the average user, but I think they’re a sign that the Google Reader team is truly paying attention to what user’s want and building out sharing items into a robust system.

http://mashable.com/2008/05/05/google-reader-shared-items-upgrades/