Sharing In Google Reader Is Dead. Now What?

Google Plus is for social media updates.  Google Reader is for reading news.  Until Google Reader has all of the updates from Google Plus, I don't want people to share all their favorite news in a social media service most generally used for original content.  The killer feature in the recently removed Google Reader sharing features for me was the ability to easily add articles to a feed of stories that I find important that other people can later read in Google Reader.  It was a way for people to kind of crowd-source the news that their friends found most important.

Here's how I created an RSS news feed of my favorite articles that my friends could subscribe to in Google Reader:
  1. Set up a Delicious account.
  2. Add this bookmarklet.
  3. Point users to your new link feed: http://delicious.com/v2/rss/username/news (replace username with your delicious username)
  4. Optionally, you can create a quick share-to in Google Reader:
    1. In Google Reader, press the gear in the upper-right corner and click Google Reader Settings.
    2. Click The Send To Tab.
    3. Click "Create A Custom Link"
    4. Name = Important News (Delicious)
    5. URL = https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?description=${title}&tags=News&url=${url}
    6. Icon = http://delicious.com/favicon.ico
  5. Optionally, you can create a share-to on Android using the app DeliciousDroid.
My news feed is now available here, the most recent stories are available on the right side of this blog.
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5 comments

  1. Arpit GuglaniNovember 4, 2011 at 12:54 AM

    Good work around David - thanks!

    Another way to get around this, without having to move to Delicious is to use 'bundles'.

    One can tag the post that one wants to share, then wrap the tag in a 'bundle' and share the rss feed of the bundle.

    Check this for a step by step walk through:

    http://awesomearpit.blogspot.com/2011/11/fixing-google-reader.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. David RonNovember 4, 2011 at 10:48 AM

    Arpit, I have a few concerns with this method:
    1. It isn't a one-click solution like the old "Reader Share" feature.
    2. I could be wrong, but it doesn't appear to support sharing anything outside of Google Reader.
    3. It's likely that the Bundle feature will also be removed from Reader in the future as it is further integrated into Google+.

    Using an external social bookmarking service such as Delicious solves these problems elegantly and across all of my computers, phones, browsers, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  3. thesagefoolNovember 9, 2011 at 1:43 AM

    I may be missing something, but I can't get the bookmarklet or the "send to" option working.

    Whether I share from reader or used the bookmarklet, in both circumstances I get the following:

    ************************

    This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
    ""
    "<(SCRIPT/>"
    ""

    ************************
    (I added the exterior quotes because blogger was trying to read the above as code)

    I love this idea, and would greatly appreciate if you could help me on this so I can share this with my sharebros.

    ReplyDelete
  4. thesagefoolNovember 9, 2011 at 1:44 AM

    well, that didn't work, let's try it without the "<" & ">"

    This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
    result code="done"
    SCRIPT/
    /result

    ReplyDelete
  5. David RonNovember 9, 2011 at 8:43 AM

    Sagefool: Since you are making an API call to Delicious, it responds with an API reponse. The response it is giving you is "done" which means that you successfully created the bookmark in delicious. If you surf over to the feed you created, you should see that the article you saved was in fact added to the feed.

    ReplyDelete

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