Thursday, August 13, 2009

Google Reader, Share, Discover And Consume

You got mail!Image by Carol^-^ via Flickr

Google Reader received new features this week, the focus was to help users better share, discover, and consume content in Reader. With the introduction of the "Send to" feature which makes it easy to share posts you like to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

This feature, I have wanted to see introduced for a while, although it would be infinitely more useful through the iPhone. Through the feeds and information that I digest whilst browsing the iPhone version of Google Reader I would welcome the ability to reshare through to selected sites. To enable services, head to the settings page and there's also the ability to create customised "Send to" links with a URL template.

There's also a way for us to subscribe directly to the blogs, photos, or Twitter updates that anyone we're following has included on their Google profile. Can anyone say Friendfeed?! With the story this week that Friendfeed has been acquired by Facebook, Google Reader is well positioned to capitalise on the exodus from the web-based aggregator.To quickly subscribe to these sites, click the "From people you follow" tab on the "Browse for stuff" page. Finally also updated was the control over marking entries as read, the "Mark all as read" button now has a menu that lets you choose to only mark items as read if they're older than your specified time frame.

Google Reader continues to improve, possibly with the introduction of long polling, displaying what we share through Reader on our Google profile and maybe the ability to display our services (blogs, photos, or Twitter updates) there too, we might just have a winner!!


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