Google Reader, the Chrome Surplus Extension and Reddit

I’ve been a using Google Reader (GR) to keep up-to-date with my favorite blogs for a while now. One of my favorite features in Reader was Recommended Items. It allowed my mind to goof off with lolcatz and random geek fun, but it was also peppered with the occasional interesting scientific publication and interesting news story…plus it was pretty good at filtering out some of the juvenile crap you find on other crowd sourced news sites like Digg and Reddit. I always assumed that Recommended Items worked similar to Digg/Reddit in the way that popular stories are upvoted to the top of a list so perhaps now that the “like” button has been removed from Reader, its recommendations no longer have a way to get to the top. Whether or not this is in fact how GR works, recommended items has been broken for months and I am finding myself crawling back to Reddit to feed my addiction of adorable cat pictures and crowd sourced news…problem is I have to sift through a lot more crap than I used to.

Others have noticed this too and have written about it in both personal blogs and the Google Reader help documentation:

1. Google Reader Help
2. Brian Shih

I still use Google Plus though…and will continue to use it over Facebook until Google screws it up. Sharing Google Reader items with friends on Google Plus is was easy (see my method) – also Google has added a share button now. Sharing Reddit items on Google Plus is more difficult…that is unless you’ve got the Surplus extension for Chrome.

Download: Share Surplus extension for Chrome

Surplus is essentially a button on your Chrome toolbar that lets you share the current URL you are viewing on Google+ circles with or without a personal message.