Google Reader is a great RSS reader. In addition to providing a great central location for reading my feeds it also allows me to, easily, share interesting feeds with other people that are using Google Reader. When I want to share an item from a feed I can click the “share” icon and “my friends” that “watch” me in Google Reader automatically have this show up in their Google Reader interface. Google has had this “share” icon for awhile and I never had a use for it until they released this ability. Before it “shared” the items but you manually had to send your “friends” a link to your shared items and they had to add it to their reader.
Google Reader has also had an email feature that allows you to email an item to a friend but I prefer the share button because, it allows my friends to choose to read the items or not, if they don’t like what I share they just hide my items in the interface. And, I am always loathe to put a person’s email address into a web form (with all the spam that people already get I hate to add to this).
Now, even though this is a great feature, I really feel that they need to add the ability to comment on an item that you share. There are many times that I share an item and I feel somewhat compelled to state why I am sharing it. I would also like to be able to share an item with a subset of my friends. Sometimes I share a tech item that might not be of interest to everyone but I know will be of interest to a few people. Or even better share items and allow people to subscribe to items that I’ve shared based on how I’ve tagged them. Maybe someone wants to see things that I share that are tech related but not political. I’m sure that Google is working on this feature right now.