Allow me to indulge my ultra geeky early-adopter-ness for a minute. Remember how I said Google Reader might eventually be as awesome as Friendfeed?

Well they keep adding more cool stuff.  Check it out.  You can share posts you like from Reader to a bunch of social sites (and even add your own); you can subscribe directly to stuff that the people you follow like, and more. Additionally, the “sharing groups” are tied to your Gmail contacts, if you use Gmail, so you can easily see who else is using it.

Louis Gray explains here and here how some of this stuff works.  His take?

“Now, every time I log into Google Reader, not only do I see new feed items to read, but I see new follower requests looking to see the shared link blog – and also, in bold, a “Comment View” which takes me to see all the comments, not just on items that I have shared, but on items shared by people whose shares that I follow. Google Reader, in a matter of months, has become a very serious part of the conversation. In light of the uncertainty around FriendFeed and how that company will integrate with Facebook, I am betting that some people are looking back at their RSS reader for information consumption and now, social discussion.”

Exactly!  The  killer thing here, in my mind, is that many, many people use Google Reader already, to a greater or lesser extent.  So over time, as people get used to the added functionalities, they can start playing around with the commenting and sharing features as well as having it just be a repository for keyword alerts and blog feeds.  So the potential to have those water cooler conversations with more of your peeps than only those early adopters who were hanging out in Friendfeed is huge.

Here’s my share page, if you’d like to follow me.

I also tried creating a bundle of my fave must-read association blogs – kind of like a one-stop shop of association management valuable stuff.  And here’s my fave social media blogs bundle, and my tech blogs bundle. Check ‘em out!  You can just skim a few or you can subscribe to the bundles; might be useful if you’re just starting out using Google Reader for blog reading.

Anyway, just playing around with this, but I truly think it’s one to keep an eye on.

7 responses to "More on Google Reader as the killer social app."