In the RSS world, Google Reader has become the defacto standard for reading the feeds quickly and absorbing the information you need. Before Google Reader achieved dominance, FeedDemon was the gold standard, and still maintains impressive usage numbers to this day.
Steven Hodson today reports over at Shooting at Bubbles that FeedDemon now supports synchronization with Google Reader’s Shared Items.
This is a pretty big deal – Google Reader’s Shared Items is a pretty powerful too, which can be used by aggregators like RSSMeme and Adam Ostrow’s ReadBurner to effectively track what the hardcore blogosphere reading public finds interesting. On an individual level, though, the fact that Google Reader Shared Items offers RSS and ATOM feeds for all shared items, it offers a powerful tool to those who want to export their favorite articles to other interfaces.
I myself use the GSRI interface for sharing those articles out to my Twitter feed through FriendFeed’s syndication options. It’s an easy way to provide my followers food for thought throughout the day without interrupting my workflow.
This shows that the web based Google Reader also has a future as a platform, rather than simply an app, since FeedDemon is the second program I know (following Feedly) to use the GSRI interface outside of Google Reader itself.
