Google Reader added a useful feature for some of us who wants to have control over the shared items. It now allows you to select from Gmail contacts list who can see your shared items.
With the new controls you can allow all chat buddies to see your shared items, or you choose from your contact to those your shared items will be sent.
You can also manage who shares with you. When someone shares with you first time, you will get a notification, you can preview it and subscribe to their shared items. You can also choose to share your items with them or not.
Remember when your share items in Google Reader they are available with a Public URL, so even if you don’t share with some people they will still access your shared items if they know the URL.
Image Via Google Blog
Scoble actually predicted a Google Reader social bookmarking engine in 2006.
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.