You can now add your messages to Google Reader to be seen by your Google friends. To post a note, log-in to Reader and click Your stuff -> Notes to the left. This will open a box where you can type in a note with any thought, Friendfeed/ Twitter-style. To find out who exactly your friends are, check the Friends tab at the Settings page for an overview (or click the Manage Friends links).
Next to the notes box, there’s also a new bookmarklet to share items you find on the web. Just drag and drop the link to your bookmarks and you can activate it when you stumble upon something; you can also add a custom note to items, Google explains in a blog post.
Another new feature is that the layout of your Shared Items page can now be customized to *drumroll* display one of three graphics on top (titled ice cream, ninjas and sea).
Google Reader tries to be a lot of things all at once, these days, but I think the handling – especially of the social features, which are magically interrelated with Gmail/ Google Chat – can feel a little cluttered and confusing. But I’m not a Google Reader user to begin with (I’m mostly using Friendfeed, which offers opt-in subscriptions independent of a friendship status)... what do you all think?
[Via Friendfeed. Hat tip to Leon Santiago!]
Update: Ryan points out that you can share blogs posts and change the text of them – without Google Reader disclosing this when other readers see the item, which might make them to believe they’re reading the original text by the blog (e.g. as it will say “from [blog name]” below the title). Ouch.
Note the upper-case bit that reads “This is a test to see if I can alter ...”
[Thanks Ryan! Screenshot by Ryan.]
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