Today confirms that Google’s not giving up their quest to become more social media friendly. Earlier today they introduced a series of new iGoogle features that make it more of a social network than a start page, and just now they’ve released an update to your Google Reader to turn it into a social distribution utility for news on the web.
Google Reader “Send To” is the new feature that you’re likely to love instantly. It’s the feature we’ve wanted from our reader since Twitter became our favorite place to share interesting links. In fact, with Send To you can set your settings to send posts to almost every social site that matters: Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and — obviously — Twitter.
Once you configure your favorite social sites to send to in settings — you can even add your own custom destinations — you’ll notice that you can then select the send to button at the bottom of the post and pick your final destination.
Google Reader has also introduced a few less social, but more practical ways, to engage with their feed aggregator. They’ve added a better way to quickly subscribe to the feeds from people you follow, and also given you an easier way to mark items as read in bulk. So now you can select the “Mark all as read” drop down to fine tune your preferences and only mark items older than a day, a week, or two weeks as read in one easy click.
Google Reader is starting to blossom, and we’re a big fan of the new social additions. Share your thoughts on the refreshed Google Reader in the comments.
Reviews: Delicious, Digg, Google, Google Reader, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Twitter, blogger, facebook
Tags: google reader