Bring Back Shared Items And People You Follow In The New Google Reader

Shared items in Google Reader was an “exclusive” feature which other desktop and online RSS readers lack.

Reading content from blogs is one thing but you also want to read content that your social friends enjoy reading. Sure there are social sites like Twitter and Facebook, but when it comes to reading and only reading (without distractions) – I still prefer Google Reader.

“Shared items” and “People you Follow” feature was killed in the recent Google Reader design update.  As of now, there is no way you can follow people in Google Reader and neither you can read their previously shared items within your own Google Reader account. If you have directly subscribed to the RSS feed URL of someone’s Google Reader shared items (public), you can still read them.

Otherwise, there is no way to find the link to someone’s Google Reader shared items, because the “People You Follow” section has been trimmed off from the new Google Reader interface.

Bring Back People You Follow In The New Google Reader – Read Previously Shared Items Of Google Reader Friends

Here is a nice workaround.

Go to Ridllr.com, sign in with your Google Reader account, grant all the necessary permissions and you are done. This app will create a new folder within your Google Reader account, housing all the public shared feeds of your Google Reader friends. There is one bug though, numbers will appear instead of real names but that’s fine, considering the fact that you now have access to all the older shared items from “People you follow” section.

If you want your Google Reader connections to follow your shared stories, tell them to use Ridllr and they can read your shared stories pretty much the same way as you can.

Sharing articles to your public Google Reader feed is easy, all you have to do is tag the item with “Shared items” and it’s done. Neat!

Reading Your Shared Items In The New Google Reader

So how do you find out the public link of your own Google Reader shared items?

While you are signed into your Google Reader account, click this link and it will load your shared items within your Google Reader account.

Next, right click the “Your Shared items” link and open it in a new browser tab or window. You now have the public link of your Google shared shared items, which anyone can subscribe to in their RSS readers. [See example]

Social commenting in Google Reader was killed prior to the recent design update. I am not sure how long the classical features of Google reader are going to stay, so it would be better if you completely back up Google reader settings from Reader > Reader settings > Import/Export