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.
While the new friends features point to the kind of effortless sharing/tracking that Google is using to build a sort of social network between its various services, there's a few problems with the service.
Most obviously Google's assumption that you want to your Shared Items visible to all your contacts may raise privacy concerns for some. For instance, if you have work contacts listed along side personal, everybody using Reader will now see your shared items, which in some cases, may not be what you want.
Hopefully Google Reader will eventually include some kind of filtering based on friend context — a way to control who sees what — but for now keep in mind that your shared items are public in the broadest sense of the word (of course they always have been, but previously you could rely on the need for a feed URL as a kind of privacy).
The other and more significant problem is how your friends' shared items look to you. The stream of incoming shared items is no different than any other tag or subsection of Reader, which means it's blissfully unaware of duplicates. How big of deal that is depends on how many feeds you have coming in and how diverse your friends are are in what they share.
Still, minor quirks aside, the new Friend's feeds are quite nice (provided you have a lot of friends within the Gmail/Reader sphere) and continues Google's rumored goal of turning Gmail and Reader into your social networking hub.
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