I haven’t thought about this post too much, but wanted to quickly share my opinion on this as I think I finally found a way to let Twitter and Google Reader live in harmony.

Many others have written and talked how they don’t use Google Reader anymore and let Twitter curate news for them on the fly. It makes sense, if enough people find something useful in your peer group you’re bound to see it. If your friends don’t retweet something, it’s unlikely that it would have interested you anyway. This of course is the case when you follow enough people with similar interests to you.

I find Twitter extremely useful, but I still want to constantly follow certain people because I don’t think their blog posts are a matter of reaching me as the story breaks. Thus, one could say I follow the most important sources/blogs through Google Reader as I’ll go through the latest blog posts no matter what.

Google Reader has also this feature where you’re able to follow other people’s shared items. I find this part of Google Reader pretty irrelevant for me. Anyhow, I also follow most, if not all, of these people on Twitter. Thus, the posts they share on Twitter replaces the Google Reader part completely. Also, many of the stories shared in the social part of Google Reader tend to be outdated if I read them a week later (which usually was the case, because people share a lot of stuff).

So, to summarise – I use Twitter as my social news curator and Google Reader as something of a more established source of news/blog posts I’d read anyhow. It’s bit similar to the differentiation between breaking news and more analytical pieces of journalism.

How do you position Google Reader and Twitter to each other (or do you use something altogether)?

(Photo by Brittany Randolph)