I’m still mulling over the notion of somehow using Google Reader in a more “social” fashion (earlier aside on the topic). One of the aspects of GReader I like the most is the “share” button; I just really like the ability to mark a post shared when I think other folks might like it. I have the shared posts feed on almost every page of my blog in hopes that visitors might find it interesting as well.
As I browse other blogs, I’ve seen that I’m not alone. Other bloggers are also sharing interesting articles on their sites. OK, it’s not on the majority of blogs by any means, but there are enough doing this to make it interesting.
Hey, did I mention everybody using Google Reader (and perhaps other readers too?) has an RSS feed of their shared articles? In other words, a feed full of stuff that the person reading saw fit to share with others.
Now, suppose some clever person wanted to “socialize” all that and began to collect those feeds? Or maybe not even collect, but got the word out and have folks drop by and add theirs. See where this is headed? It almost becomes a distributed sort of Digg!
No need to visit one site to submit articles — just click the button in your reader. The centralized aggregator will pick those up, tally ‘em and present a rolling set of results.
How interesting might that be? An anonymous social thingy that shows a collection of “highly shared” posts.
Would be kind of fun to build, wouldn’t it? (And if anyone is inspired by the idea, run with it!)
Oh sure, there’s a lot more thought that needs to go into the idea. For instance, how to step on folks trying to game the system and get their own posts ranked high. Granted, they’d have to have a bunch of google accounts, each with a google reader account, each subscribed to their own feed… I guess they could script or automate it all though. Hmmm, that’s an issue.
Or off on a tangent: maybe theFeedBurner folks could get involved. Just thinking out loud here, but they process a lot of feeds that folks read. Why not add yet another Feed Flare type thing that might do the “sharing” instead of Google Reader? Opens it up to more folks to share interesting posts. No GReader necessary.
What do you think? Is the idea worth thinking about in more detail?
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April 19th, 2007 
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I also like Google reader, but it’s because it was the first one I tried.
I agree with this idea that you have presented. One of the hardest things I face is trying to find the right things to read. I feel like I go through so much junk that I don’t care about.