Along the left side of Google Reader there’s now a new entry “Friends’ shared items.” What I do is read this folder first, then click over to All items which then won’t have any duplicates in it.

Some things I’m learning: more than half of my Friends’ shared items are things I would have found anyway. But my friends are darn good at picking great items. So, if I only have five minutes to read feeds I’ll read this folder only. That way at least I’ll catch the coolest stuff without having to slog through a bunch of noise. My friends are pre-filtering my feeds!

Second, the items that they bring me that I wouldn’t know about are magical. It’s like I have hundreds of people scouring the Internet looking for great blogs that I should know about. This is already better than Digg or Stumbleupon, but it’s only from my friends (who are defacto early adopters), so it’s very focused stuff with very little noise so far. It’ll be interesting to see if that scales up. I loved Digg at first but then it became noisier and noisier, to the point that I don’t read Digg much anymore.

Anyway, all this means is that even better stuff is coming to you via my link blog, er my Google Reader’s shared items blog.

I still wish the Google Reader team would do a better job of getting rid of duplicates. Also, I’m seeing items multiple times even in the Your shared items feed. Those need to be joined together in one item.