Kiran’s Weblog

Sharing from Google Reader - Now with endless possibilities

Google Reader just added a feature which lets you share with twitter, facebook, delicious etc. However, the biggest feature for me is the custom link. Its an extremely powerful feature for developers. The custom link basically allows you to take the title, url, etc and call any HTTP GET APIs with these parameters. Here is what I just did for example I wrote a Web App (using the Google App Engine for Java) that takes in the the articles title and short url and I created several types of shares. Share to twitter with a prefix- liked, with a prefix- Reading or with a Prefix- Share. I also created a shareType to allow me to quickly tip @techmeme the articles I like and I think will be breaking news material for techmeme.
I also created an API to post to my posterous account. This is another interesting thing to note. Posterous gives an awesome ability to auto post to tons of places that you can take advantage.

For basic users the default sendTo Twitter etc will work great! However for developers custom link creates endless possibilities to share. The default sendTo twitter requires authentication, the Twitter share I created for myself using a web API does not even require that, I use a private key to identify myself.

Google Reader keeps getting better day by day. Awesome Google Reader Team!