Google Reader has a feature where you can mark items from your RSS feed as “shared”, which makes them available on a page that anyone else can see, if they’re interested in what you find interesting. The page then also has an RSS feed of its own, so that you can subscribe to your friends “shared” items.
If you’re interested, here’s my shared items page.
It’s a good idea; I only have one thing I wish they’d change. A couple times I’ve run into items that I’m reading in Google Reader from a friend’s shared items that I’ve subscribed to (Dan’s, for example) and the issue is that if they’ve marked something as shared that you’ve already read, it will come up again from their feed. I’d like it to be smart enough to realize that for a story that I’ve already marked as read to not show it again in reading other shared feeds.
I think the point for ‘shared’ is to see what they’ve marked read not to see more items from another source. I actually like to see what others have read regardless if I’ve already read it, since that just shows I’m interested in the same topic and if connected through another service (like pownce) I can message him/her.
Yeah, that’s true; that is a good aspect to it, but I’d still like it to be flagged in some way in case I don’t remember reading it until I read through the first paragraph or so.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot… does anyone else have any Reader feeds to share? I know that others of you who read this use Google Reader, but I don’t know what anyone’s shared feed URL is, other than Dan’s.