I read a lot of news – ok, I skim a lot of news – and the stuff that I find interesting should be shared. Google Reader had a great feature called Share for just that. I had a Google Shared Items page, and also used its RSS feed to share on Twitter and other social sites. That’s what Twitter is all about – follow interesting people to learn interesting things – and this was my contribution. The result was those that followed my Google Reader Shared Page – or my Tweets – would see the best of my news feed. Everything was working just grand until Google broke the Share feature of Reader.
It made no sense – the share feature was a social feature and used by many, but Google’s defintion of social is Google Plus and nothing else. So Google made Google Plus sharing easier, and killed the ability to share with other sites from Reader. It took some time, but I found a reasonable solution with Pinboard. I set up a Pinboard account (small fee) – and set up Google Reader to share items with PinBoard using Reader’s “Send To” feature. PinBoard is a bookmarking site, but it generates its own RSS. The RSS then provides links to the source (shared) content rather than to itself like Blogger or Tumblr and other services I tried.
Sharing isn’t quite as smooth as it was. Now it takes a few more clicks to share, but I restored the functionality of the RSS feed. If you would like to add my shared items feed to your RSS reader, you can with this RSS address:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TPShared
Or you can check out my new TalkingPointz page on Facebook which offers all of my shared items as well as my posts and selected telecom news.
Or you can hit my blog’s home page and see not only this feed, but my Twitter group’s feed as well. My shared items are also tweeted and shared with LinkedIn.
To setup Google Reader to work with Pinboard, go into Reader Settings and select Send To. Add a custom link. Under URL add http://pinboard.in/add?url=${url}&title=${title} and under icon add http://pinboard.in/favicon.ico. Once you associate the two services, to share a post just Send To Pindboard.
Related: On Google Reader Changes: Google’s NetFlix Moment on NoJitter.
(Cross-posted @ TalkingPointz)
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Have you tried Delicious ? Given what you said it looks like it works the same way as Pinboard and has no fee.
I had the same problem when Google Reader changes its ways. The best piece I read on the topic was Bob Warfield’s: http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/google-reader-another-brick-in-googles-garden-wall/
On a practical level, I had a problem like you did because my @jonerpnewsfeed on Twitter was populated by shared items from Google Reader. I had some trial and error with new solutions like you did, but after talking with @dbmoore who also curates enterprise news, I decided to try Delicious as the “send to” option and it’s been working very well, so now Delicious populates my jonerpnewsfeed Twitter account. I still use dlvr.it to customize the tweets and deliver them to the newsfeed twitter account – that part hasn’t changed. Delicious does not charge for this, so it’s all still free, curated news.
good luck with your feed…I guess I’m glad we still have Reader but Google really hacked it good.
– Jon
Just add a new “Send To Twitter” option (the original broke with New Twitter change).
Name: Send to New Twitter
URL: http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=${title}&url=${url}
Icon URL: http://si0.twimg.com/images/dev/cms/intents/bird/bird_blue/bird_16_blue.png
Now you basically have the same that you use to with Share.