What Are Your Friends Reading?

Google Reader has streamlined the process of tracking what your friends are reading by automatically adding their shared items to a new, aptly named, "Friend's Shared Items," option in the main menu of Reader. Of course you could already be subscribed to your friends' shared items via their public RSS feed, but the new features eliminate the need to manually add that information.

The friends are pulled from Google Talk (the chat component of Gmail) and once you’ve logged into Reader and looked over the change notice, you’ll see a new settings tab labeled “friends,” where you can see the new feeds you’re now subscribed to, along with an option to hide an individual’s feed.