Social media’s changed how users consume content. In the past, we’d read a few news websites or top blogs, and our trust came from those brands. However, with the rise of social filtering and tools like Facebook and Twitter, more and more of our news comes from our friends, who share what they find interesting. This is part of why retweeting and link sharing has become such a hot trend.

Google Reader, the most popular tool for reading RSS feeds, recognizes this phenomenon. In May, they launched a friends trends tool to help you determine who was worth following, but that’s nothing compared to the changes that Google’s making today: it has added the ability to follow specific users and to “like” articles.

In other words, Google Reader has emulated FriendFeed, Facebook, and Twitter.

There are really three big feature changes: followers, friend groups, and likes. On the first feature, Google has the following to say:

“Instead of sharing your items with others and hoping they reciprocate, you can now find people with public shared items and subscri