I’ve been using Google Reader as my news aggregator for some time now.  Now some people might say that feed readers are dead along with RSS, but I beg to differ.  It’s the best way for me to catch up on news using a uniform interface for easy scanning.  If I want to go in depth, I can read the whole article there or open in a new tab.  I had a hard time sharing any articles I find worthy of telling others about.  The same thought leaders of today who say RSS is dead are the same ones who exclaim that Twitter is the king of up to second news.  Until the middle of last year, there was no way for me to share links in a fast and easy way plus post it to my Twitter followers.  Now I can with Google Reader’s ‘Send To’ feature.

The ‘Send To’ feature announced last August enables Google Reader users to send articles to any kind of service, including Twitter.  Programs like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and Twitterrific had options to post interesting links and shrink them to fit Twitter’s 140 character limit.  I always thought that was cool, but it wasn’t enough for me to leave my Google Reader ecosystem.  With the ‘Send To’ feature, I now can share links to my personal Google Reader feed then send it to Twitter as a shrunk link in Bit.ly.  I’m getting the best of both worlds.

Please check out Lifehacker’s guide to the ‘Send To’ feature as they do a better job than I would on how to get the most out of this cool feature.  If anyone out there currently doesn’t use a feed reader, I suggest you do so.  Not just for this indirect Twitter integration, but it is a great way to catch up any piece of content that utilizes RSS feeds.  Your favorite companys, blogs, friends websites, etc. can all be centralized in one main information scanning application.  You could even subscribe to podcasts and listen to them in Google Reader.  So give a whirl and start sending stuff back out into the Twitter echo chamber.