Short version

Google Reader’s sharing features are going away, but I’ve built a site that will let you continue to share and consume content using Google Reader.

Still here? Here comes the longer version…

Bye bye Google Reader social features!

If you are a user of Google Reader’s social features, it appears they will be mostly going away really soon. This blog post describes some of the changes, but from what I can gather, the new google reader:

• will not be able to see shared items in google reader anymore.
• share-with-note will still work for the time being.
• will allow you to +1 to Google+.
• will NOT allow you to migrate your followers/followed people.
• Google+ has a very limited API and also no ability to do restriction by source (i.e. you can’t separate my baby photos or the photos from yesterday’s night out on the town from my favourite articles on the Canadiens’ dismal state of affairs).

This sucks! How can you help?

If you will miss consuming shared items from your friends in Google Reader, ridllr can help!

• If you grant ridllr permission, we will saves your friend information from Google Reader, and rebuilds (something very much like) the “people you follow” folder. You can continue to follow read your friends’ shared items.
• Once sharing is removed from Google Reader (later this week!),  RIDLLR will allow you to continue to share items by assigning a tag to it.
• A Chrome extension will be released along with UI is out to help automate this.
• ridllr also has the option of allowing you to use the “star” feature to share content but this is not enabled by default due to some potentially suboptimal side effects.

Convinced? Let’s get started

I’m still reading! What more can you tell me?

Here is what the new Google Reader might look like

Artist’s rendering. NB: IANAA.

This shows some of the new features RIDLLR adds.