Google Reader is my social media cockpit, the place where I pilot my online life. A lot of information ca be processed through the greader, but the trick to grow your online presence is to transform incoming RSS signals into outgoing signals. Here are a few tools that can dramatically increase the interaction between your feeds and other social networks.
A great source for info about Google Reader is Louis Gray, a darn smart tech blogger and feed lover. Those are GreaseMonkey scripts by the way, so get the add-on here if you want the following links to work for you (for FF only).
- greader to Delicious: Adds a button at the bottom of your feed to directly bookmark this item in your Delicious account.
- greader to Digg: Same as above, but submit items to Digg.
- greader to Twitter: Same as above, but shares the link on your Twitter stream – a less involving way to share links.
- Expand article in greader: A great tool for saving time on opening and closing tabs, something that can be really messy when you start getting +1000 feeds a day. See it as a mini-browser that sits inside any of your items’ box.
- Filter your feeds by keywords: This one is a precious baby. Simply specify which keywords you prefer or dislike, and the script will highlight related articles in a color that indicates the items that contain your keywords. Excellent when you are in a hurry to find that specific piece of news (works only in view lists mode).
- Optimized greader: Not everyone might like this one as it changes the design of greader to make it more compact, therefore showing more items.
- Show Disqus Comments: No need to open link in a new tab, or expand the page with the expand tool above. Click the comments button to make the Disqus comment thread appear and participate to a post’s discussion.
- Blogsearch box in your greader: Sometimes you really get excited about an item that just rolled in your reader. Investigate a little more before sharing it back with the community, submit it to the Blogsearch first.
Other Google Reader tools:
- greader integrator in gmail: As the name says, this script will display your feeds in a sidebar widget, and expand if you click on a feed. It can be super useful if you post blog posts from your gmail account for example.
- Readair: Adobe Air app to read feeds from your desktop. Can be useful, but I see greader as a connectivity tool, and the readair cannot be tweaked with all the script goodness I mentioned above, so it ends up being a plain feed reader (ability to star and share though).
Those are the basic tools you should use if your online activity implies a lot of sharing. There are probably a ton of other scripts to be used, so make use of the comment box below to share your knowledge. It would be greatly appreciated.