You’ve been able to share items with your Google Reader friends forever. You could also publish a page of all the articles and pages you share to the public in HTML or RSS format.
Google added a bunch of new features to Google Reader today that enhance the experience of sharing items with people. If you’re a regular reader of my site, you might remember that I specifically asked for these features back in February:
Currently, Im using Facebook Shared Items to compliment my Google Reader shared items, mostly because I can personalize the message and give my shared item some context. If Google Reader supported something like this, even a Twitter-esque 140 character limit to the comment, I could ditch my Facebook crutch for this sort of thing.
Of the new stuff launched today, most notable is the ability to add a short note along with the shared item to give it some context:
If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader, but think your friends might not “get” why you are sharing it. Use the “Share with note” button on the item toolbar to create a copy of that item with your own note attached to it.
Now in addition to the familiar “Share Item” button at the bottom of each post, there is a “Share with Note” button as well
Even, better, the Google Reader team has developed a bookmarklet you can keep handy in your toolbar to share items and add notes from any webpage you’re looking at, just like I do now with Facebook. This is big. No longer am I stuck sharing posts from blogs that I subscribe to in my feed reader, now the whole web is my oyster!
You could build an entire blog, tumblelog, or just link blog right with these new tools!
Finally, and perhaps most disruptive in the feature, is the ability to simply add a random thought as a note into your shared items feed. Does this look familiar?
It should if you use Twitter. I can now link up pages with my commentary and analysis and intersperse it with random thoughts and ideas ala micro blogging. It’s my theory that Google is gunning for Google Reader to be the hub of your entire micro-link-blogging world. I give their team one or two more iterations and some API building before we’ve got something truly compelling on our hands.
Finally, as I was showing this stuff to Ed Finkler, he noticed a major oversight: no shortcuts for the new features! Eek! What a way to tarnish such a cool launch! Google Reader friends, please add a shortcut for sharing with a note as soon as you can :)