Mountain View, California — Search engine leader Google has already been busy as just yesterday it introduced a new social features for the iGoogle start page, and now it has diverted its attention to the popular feed reader, added a number of new features to Google Reader.
According to the Official Google Reader Blog, newly added features in Google’s Reader service simplifies it for users to share, manage, and discover content.
However, the important one, which was long overdue, is the ability to share content on other social networks. Now when a user wish to share something with your contacts on Google Reader, you also have the option of choosing to send it to your accounts on Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Twitter.
Sharing content on multiple sites is hardly anything new anymore but it does add a new layer of interactivity to Google Reader. This should have been available for ages, but it has been MIA until now.
There were number of new features announced, but the most important has to be the new “Send To” feature. Users can enable the services they want to use in a new section in the Settings page and there is also the possibility to create a custom “Send To” link by clicking on the boxes of which services you want to include in the drop down menu.
When you go to the settings page in Google Reader, find the Send To tab. From there, you can select other services to send your shared items to. Then you can easily share content via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. as you come across it in Google Reader.
The final new feature is gaining more control over what you mark as read. Another, is the ability to easily subscribe to feeds from the people you follow. If you click on one of your followers, you can see the feeds they have included in their Google Profile (if any), and you can go from there. Another option is to click the “From people you follow” tab on the “Browse for stuff” page.
Another noteworthy novel feature in Google Reader is the inclusion of more options under “Mark as Read.” There is a pull-down menu, which allows you to select whether you want to mark all items as read, or just the ones that are older than a day, a week, or two weeks.
Apart from numerous features, according to Google, when you expand an item in comment view, you can now get the full set of actions (share, like, star), without leaving comment view. Google has also added a “Feeds” start-page option for the iPhone/Android/Pre mobile interface, and an option to show notes when embedding shared items on other pages as clips.