Google Reader

Reader’s the center of all my information consumption, but previously wasn’t so good at letting you share that information. If you wanted to bookmark something, or share a cool article with a friend, your options were limited. You’d either star an item, and then come back to it later, or you’d share it – but then only other Google Reader users could see it, and then that was only if you were friends on Google Reader. Which I have, like, three of.

But Google, always in sync with my needs (we have a wonderful and functional relationship, Google and I), has just released a “Send To” feature for Reader. Send To lets you share an article via Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, (though those are sort of the same now, huh?) Digg, Posterous, and many more.

To set this up, open Reader. At the top right of the page, click “Settings.” You’ll then see a tab in Settings called “Send To.” Click it. Then, select the service or services you want to add to your Send To… menu in Reader.

The list is long, but you’re not limited to it. With a bit of know-how, you can create a custom link that’ll let you send the Reader item to any service or website you can dream up – the link to do that is at the bottom of the “Send To” Settings page.

People are already starting to cook these up. There’s a way to send from Google Reader to Evernote; a way to send to Instapaper; a way to send to ShareThis (which has every social network you can imagine), and many, many more. A little Googling, and I’m betting you can add anything you can think of.

Once you’re all set up, sending items can be done in two ways. You can either go to the end of an item, and click the “Send To” button, which brings up a dropdown menu of all your options; or, hit Shift-T to open the same menu for the current item. I use the keyboard shortcut all the time (I heart keyboard shortcuts), and it’s definitely the fastest solution.

Whether you use Delicious, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, or just about anything else, you can now send directly to it from Google Reader – skipping at least one step, and a whole bunch of hassle.

What’s your bookmarking and sharing method of choice?

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The basics are the same. Fnd your books, add them, share them, indicate if you want to read a book and so on. However you can add your books using inline editing. With Library things you add a book, a page is loaded, you edit, then have to go back. With Goodreads there is a sort of inline popup box allowing you to add books much quicker. I owe about 40 Terry Pratchett books, so this made my initial set up much easier.

There is also a cool book compatability test which shows you, based upon your reading of a lot of books, which books would be best for you. This, and other friendly features make this more appealing to me, while basically there is not much difference between the two. If you’ve alread set one up extensively perhaps you’re better off there, but if you are ust starting I suggest going with Goodreads.

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You might think I’m a social junkie, no way. I love social sites, but I actually never use them because I can’t be bothered to update my status all the time, keep track of others and so on. I use the absolute bare minimum, Stumble Upon for my blog and for fun, Digg now and then, Twitter to keep in contact with my readers and others and Youtube for my music and I get at least 20 emails from these services daily. If you are a heavy socializer, I suggest creating a separate inbox for these things.

The best way to do that is creating a forwarder to shoot all these social emails to another inbox, while still being able to provide your regular email address at these sites. Is it really that important to acknowledge a friend request right away or to view that shared video 5 seconds after it’s sent? Just shoot everything off to a separate inbox and spend 20 minutes at the end of the day going through your social mail. This will make your like a lot more productive and you will be interrupted much less. If you are an active social person on the web please let us know how you cope with all the emails, and other “paperwork” this generates, I’m dying to know how others do this.

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