Google Reader gets more social networky
Please welcome blogger Bob Walsh to Webware. Walsh has worked as a reporter for UPI, as a software developer, and now consults with start-ups and independent software vendors. He also writes at 47hats.com. --Rafe Needleman
Yes, you can pick your friends.
Users of Google's RSS reader got a new social networking feature today: the capability to selectively pick and choose who of your Gmail/Gtalk friends get first crack at the items you want to share.
Back in May, Google turned on the capability for users to share RSS picks with all their Google contacts from GReader, but it was an all-or-nothing choice. The new feature lets you create a custom Friends list for the RSS items you want to share. Friends lists are the meat and potatoes of social networks.
There still is a static public URL for the GReader items you decide to share, assuming someone knows it. If part of your job description is finding posts that matter to your company or organization, GReader's new sharing feature is tailor-made for it.
The new GReader feature goes head-to-head with FriendFeed's RSS social-networking style. Sharing "the news" with people you know is natural; this new feature makes it just that much easier to do online.
See also: Official Google post on the new feature.
You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and here?s the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.
Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.
What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.
The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.
Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers can?t change your title tag.
After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=136
It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.
If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.
Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.
One thing I have not quite figured out is if using FeedBurner now hurts you since the links point at the FeedBurner redirect rather than your site like a WordPress feed does.