Reid Dossinger

The social sharing world has seemed bleak for those of us who found the shared items in Google Reader to be the single best place to read and discuss the news. But I've found a little light lately in turning to Tumblr as a way to share links and pictures and allow discussion on said articles. It's easy to set up. Get a Tumblr in shape and then: Add Tumblr to the Send To button (Reader Settings > Send To). This will take the place of the "Share with note" functionality. Go get the "Share on Tumblr" bookmarklet at the Tumblr Goodies page . This will let you share any article you find.  To get the commenting experience, sign up for Disqus , create a new site and then enter the shortcode into your Tumblr. Those things will let you share to Tumblr as easily as you did to Reader.  Of course, Tumblr still pales in comparison to Reader, if only because Reader allowed you to have all shared articles AND comments in the same place where you were readi...

Sometime this week (supposedly), Google Reader is going to lose its social feature  to Google Plus. This is a damn shame, since the People You Follow space has been, hands down, THE best social sharing tool I've ever used. In fairness, I think that Reader has been as great as it has been because the number of people I knew who used it was a pretty small group that was limited mostly to my closest friends who have a great deal of insight and share judiciously. But I also love Reader in that it's extremely easy to share, easy to comment, and easy to control privacy, all on articles that you often don't have to leave the interface to read in their entirety. Some of my Reader friends have taken this news pretty hard, and that was my first impression (and really, second through sixth as well), but I'm kind of curious to see what the Plus integration will hold. It's possible that, a month or two from now, we'll be raving about how great Plus is for sharing articles ...