Digital Musings

Do you use the Google Reader? Do you have a lot of friends on G-Talk? Then you  might find this interesting. Today when I opened my Google reader a new pop-up came up telling me now its possible to share my feed items with friends on GTalk. I have been using the Google reader for quite some time now and I have seen it evolving and integrating features like getting its own search option, providing the feed count via Feedburner ( a good feature to track number of subscribers to ones blog) and Google Reader International versions ( French and Japanese).

If you are new to this whole sharing business, let me explain it in brief. Google Reader automatically creates a public page for any items that you mark as “shared.” You can also choose to create public pages for your starred items, or for items you have marked with a particular tag. If you decide to share some feeds with your friends, all you need to do is click on the share link at the bottom of the post and the icon turns orange indicating that now the feed is being displayed on the shared page, and is visible to friends on your Gtalk list. To view which posts have been shared till now, you can click on the shared items link (on left sidebar of the reader) and it would display your public page, with the shared posts.

Also, you can decide while setting up the sharing feature, which friends can see the public page. If its shared, it doesn’t mean everyone on the list can see that page. If you like you can share information just with your close friends or co-workers. If you want a fresh start you also have an option to erase previous sharing history. How about that?

This is an interesting feature and can be put to good use, if you have a decent social network, especially on IM clients.
I had written about growing one’s social network through IM Network some time back, and I was able to get acquainted with some really famous bloggers like Daniel from DaliyBlogTips, Fred Peters from Newestonthenet and Maki from Dosh Dosh. Also I have a lot of fellow bloggers who share a lot of stuff common to our niche through various social networking sites. However if one is on IM, you would get to share stuff in real time.

I just cant stress enough the importance of being on top of things in your niche by being the first one to blog about a certain topic. Yesterday I wrote about the Yahoo Shortcut WordPress plugin, immediately after it was released. Now that post ranks 11th in Google results along with blogs like Weblog Tools Collection and Read Write Web and I have received more than 300 unique visitors to that posts already.

Now a days, the RSS feeds have penetrated almost every aspect of the internet and now they are making their way into Instant Messaging, the original social networking tool. I have always been an IM fan as I like to do things in real time. So I guess this would be quite useful for me to share stuff with my fellow bloggers.

Can you think of any other use this can be put to? Would you start using this feature?

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