Google has added the ability to share content from Google Reader to friends on Google Talk.
This is essentially how it works: you log into Reader and see a friends tab where you can now specify friends from your broader network (ie: Gmail/ GTalk contacts) to share items of interest with.
I’m a little underwhelmed by it all, but Robert Scoble isn’t and Steve Rubel sexes the announcement up to the point of calling it part of “Google’s Stealth Social Net,” which makes it seem a whole lot more interesting than it would appear on the surface. Of course like any good Google product it’s another cross-promotion tool that encourages you to use more of Google’s products.
More at the Google Blog here. Maybe after the bombshell of Knol yesterday I’m just easily unexcited today. If you share things using Google Reader now you can share with more people…which is great if you’re heavily into sharing, if you didn’t even know that you could share things in Reader or don’t use the feature, then nothing exciting here.
I think you just need more friends to see why this is cool.
Robert
no shortage of friends, I just need more time to share things..Twitter already consumes most of my free time
yaaa, hitting shift+s is a real drain of my time!
mario
I use Reader to scan news, if I want to share things I’ll blog about it or set up a Tumblr blog. As I said in the post, if you’re using Reader to share stuff, this is great, but I’m betting there are millions of people not doing so.
Duncan: turns out you’re right. This feature is bad. Clutters my “all items” news river with TONS of duplicates. Sigh. I just wrote a new post telling people to be warned by this feature until they start removing duplicates.
The duplicate issue goes well beyond sharing, and is an inherent issue in Google Reader itself. Even without sharing, the use of Google blog search terms may result in certain items showing up in Google Reader multiple times.
Why would my friends be interested in 69 feeds of mine
Nice feature
what was the deal with the big javascript popover covering everything else to notify me of this this morning? was that really necessary, google?
That’s nice way to spread content.
This feature is horrible. It’s intrusive and not particularly useful the way it’s implemented.
For what it’s worth, this feature isn’t getting great feedback on the Google Group for Reader. A lot of people are angry because it’s an opt-out model instead of an opt-in, it’s cluttering their reader, causing duplicates, and basically there’s no easy way to turn it off.
Straaaange!
kyle are you speaking to google?
Visit my Google Reader once in awhile, and I guess this would help me find related articles for my blog… cheers!
Nhick
http://www.itrush.com