Sharing Google Reader Subscriptions

Fresh from the official Google Blog: Google Reader learns to share.

So what’s this all about? We earlier discussed Google Reader, which is basically Google’s answer to the likes of Bloglines, Newsgator, Kinja, and even My Yahoo!—which are all RSS feed aggregators. Yes, having the ability to read through content from tens, hundreds, or even thousands of websites from one interface or portal is great, but the ability to share your feeds is even better. Some readers, like Bloglines and Kinja, allow users to share their bookmarked feeds/subscriptions as public feeds, or even as linkblogs.

So how does it work?

First, you have to define which particular items you wish to share. You can choose among your labels and/or your starred items. You simply click on the “share” button on top of the appropriate label, and check the “shared” checkbox. You’ve completed the first part.

Now, to share. Google gives you a unique URL (a pretty long one) which you can post on your blog or email to your friends. Once they point their browsers to this URL (say, they click on the link), they will be led to a public version of your feed reader. They won’t have to login, although having an account is helpful, as your friends can also easily subscribe to the feeds they feel like adding to their own bookmarks. If you’re a Gmail user, then Google provides a easy link you can use to send the public feed URL in an instant. What’s great with this feature is that typical of Gmail, your address book contacts are accessible with a few keystrokes—Gmail auto-completes the name/address as you type.

Next, linkblogging. If sharing via email is too old-fashioned, you can get a snippet of HTML/Javascript code you can paste onto your blog. This will then generate headlines from your subscriptions, which your blog readers will see on your site. Links are directly accessible—when they click on a headline, the source site opens on their browser.

Sharing can work the other way, too. You can actually import an OPML feed, meaning an XML file with pre-existing subscriptions saved or exported from another feed reader. So if you’re using Bloglines or another reader that can export OPML, or you can access a friend’s OPML feed, then you can upload this and the subscriptions under the feed are automatically added onto your Google Reader. How easy is that?