Note in Google Reader, Goodbye Del.icio.us & twitter

I just checked my Reader subscriptions after a long day of work. Top of the list was a post from the Official Google Reader blog about their new "Note in Reader" feature. I came straight here to post this cause I think it's pretty cool.

I have been an on and off user of del.icio.us to bookmark various things I happen upon around the net that I think are interesting and know that I wouldn't be able to find again if I tried to. I have also used twitter for the same thing (with the help of the awesome firefox extension twitterbar). These are both great services in their own right, but before today it was always a bit irritating how disconnected my own personal experience on the web is. The majority of my time on the web is spent checking my reader subscriptions and randomly stumbling upon sites (literally and figuratively).

In the past, when I have wanted to share a site with friends who use google reader I have chosen to tag them in del.icio.us and share them from reader once they show up (I subscribe to my del.icio.us feed in reader for this very reason). Twitter could be a similar experience, but I just haven't taken it that far yet. And now thanks to the good folks at Google, I can catalog my entire experience on the web (or the parts I deem important, at least) in my Reader and go back to tweeting my way out of egyptian custody.

They have made a simple javascript utility that you can throw in your bookmarks toolbar. When you click it, the script pops up a dialog allowing you to comment/tag the URL and post it to your Google Reader account as a note. By default it is set to share via Reader automatically.

The ability to tag/bookmark sites isn't quite as big a deal to me as the fact that you can do it from within Reader. All of the sudden, Reader becomes a great place to collect the content that is important to me. Subscriptions to RSS feeds that I find interesting, sites that do/don't have feeds that I have happened upon but may not want to actually subscribe to, sites that don't have anything, YT videos, etc. All connected and all within Reader.

Though it feels disconnected, there is one way in which del.icio.us still has the drop on Reader, community. One thing I really like about del.icio.us is the ability to check out links/tags from users who are bookmarking the same URLs or using the same tags. I suspect that through suggestions and some features that may come out over time, this will be less and less of an issue.

Also, I would still really like to see Reader add a post's comments into the posts within each story (at the very least for those blogs using blogger, right?). The experience of seeing what other views think is worth sharing via comments is something I really miss about living with Reader. Someday...



| del.icio.us it! |