Making Google Reader More Social
November 29th, 2007 by Michael Gray in GoogleIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
I know Google’s been trying to get more involved in the social game, but here are a few suggestions on how they can make the integration a little more seamless, and I’m totally name dropping Mihai Parparita so he catches this one ego surfing.
Currently when you mail yourself something you get this at the bottom of the email
Pretty useful and helpful, however the email a story could use some options, like say for example allowing me just to send the URL. Why would I want to do that, so I could use twittermail to email things to my twitter account. This becomes even more useful for those of us who run/manage multiple websites with role accounts. Sure I could just click through, open the URL, copy the url and change tabs to webmail and copy and paste it, but just think how much better, faster, easier it would be, if I could do it natively in Google reader.
Google’s also trying really hard to get into bookmarking space with their latest attempt Google shared stuff. How about adding that functionality into the bottom of Google reader. You could take it a step further by integrating the bookmarlet functions for popular services like Digg, Mixx, Propeller, Delicious, Sk-rt, Hugg, stumbleupon and others. Just don’t get all creepy and require people to give you the login info, just replicate the bookmarklet functionality.
Steve Rubel has an interesting series on turning GMail into your personal nerve center (part 2). I know you recently added search functionality to Google Reader as well. Well how about taking it a step further and realizing what Steve is trying to do and merging the Google reader search into Google desktop search. While we’re at it hey Ken Norton of Google Documents, can I lobby for adding Google documents into Google desktop search too? C’mon I know you guys can do it you’ve got Gmail married into Google desktop search already.
Sphere It
November 29th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I am 100% with you on this one. Here’s how I put it in my Google Reader poll: “Let me add/customize the links at the bottom of each item” and then in a comment I said
“By the way, I like the “customize the links at the bottom of each item” option. Imagine if you could add a new button that would send an item into delicious, or submit it to digg, or whatever else. The Google IE toolbar lets you create very general buttons that do custom things:
http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/apis/howto_guide.html
I’d love the ability to define a button name in Google Reader, then enter a destination url, plus the ability to have the destination url have stuff like “{url}” to fill in the url of the original item. That general ability would let people design and add their own “flair” to do lots of cool stuff.”
That would be wicked cool.
November 29th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
You rang?
Thanks for the suggestion, it’s a good one - I’ll connect with the Google Desktop team on this.
Ken
November 29th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Mm…just asking myself “how i didn’t think about it ??”
really useful idea Michael.