Shared Links

When Google Reader decided to remove everything it was good for, we all scrambled to find new homes for things we wanted to share. Tumblr became a place that most of us flocked. I’ve found Tumblr to be not a very good substitue for Google Reader’s functionality (IMHO).

The other day, carnal0wnage told me about a service called ‘Buffer’, and all this thing does is do scheduled tweets, but it has one distinct feature, not only is it focused around the sharing of links, it works (if you install the browser plugin/extension) INSIDE OF GOOGLE READER ;-) So you can be reading a feed item, push a button and not have to open a page or another app, it’s pretty much all right there.

I know what you’re thinking, cool, but no big deal right? It goes to twitter, and not to a feed that someone can subscribe to. You’re right, and I fought all day trying to figure that part out and finally came up with a twitter search for my tweets and a special hashtag I would use for my shared links. I found the RSS feed for that search and it looks like this:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from%3Amubix%20%23SharedLinks

obviously, this isn’t the easiest or pretty link to send around, so instead I pumped that into Feedburner and now have this for a feed link:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MubixLinks

Much easier to share, with one AMAZING added bonus. I can switch the feed that powers it at any time, so from now on, no matter if I use Tumblr or Google Reader (after they unjack themselves) or G+ (if they finally set up a feed for +1’d items), that will always be the link to items that I’ve personally liked and wanted to share.

I encourage you to do the same, and leave a comment, so that I can follow your feed back!

Oh, and sign up for Buffer here (w/ my referal link ;) http://bufferapp.com/r/7e450