Marketing Pilgrim

If you’ve ever been knee-deep into your Google Reader and wished you could tweet that awesome story about the dog that saved the family from a burning house, now you can.

Thanks to a host of announced updates to Google Reader, you can now send any item to Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, etc, etc. In fact, Google not only provides an already extensive list of social networks you can share RSS items with, but even includes custom fields so you can send an item anywhere you wish. Head to your "Settings" and you’ll see the new "Send To" tab:

At the bottom of each item in Google Reader, you’ll now see the new "Send To" option:

And, it works surprisingly well. This is where I’d normally inject some word of caution or perhaps take an angle that you may not of thought about. However, this really does do exactly what it says on the can. Perhaps the only thing to consider is whether Google is keeping track of how "social" an article is–and perhaps feeding that information to the apparently more social Google Caffeine. </conspiracy>

There are two additional new features from Google Reader worth talking about. One useful, one, not so much. In the "not so useful" corner is the ability to look-up and subscribe to the feeds of people you follow. Maybe I’m the only one that won’t be using that feature. In the "useful" corner, we have the new ability to "mark as read" items by their age. If you want to declare Google Reader bankruptcy, you can now do so while keeping items from the past week unread.

And that’s about all she wrote. There are a few smaller updates, so I’ll leave you to ponder their value in your life:

• When you expand an item in comment view, you now get the full set of actions, enabling you to share, like, and star items without leaving comment view.
• We added a "Feeds" start-page option for the iPhone/Android/Pre mobile interface, so you can see a list of your subscriptions when you sign in.
• There is now an option to show notes when embedding your shared items on other pages as clips.