Google Reader has been adding more and more social features recently, like the commenting on shared items options they added back in March. Today, they announced some updates that continue this push with several new social features.

The most social of Google Reader’s new features is a new section of Google Reader Trends called ‘Friends Trends.’ It’s designed to be a way to gauge how much you rely on the shared items of certain friends. You can quickly figure out whose shared blog posts you love most and who is just filling your RSS reader with noise.

While Friends Trends may be a fun and possibly insightful tool, Google’s new iGoogle importing feature takes the cake as the most useful. For anyone who has created a sophisticated iGoogle page with RSS and blog widgets, this is for you. Instead of having to re-subscribe to every single news source in Google Reader, you can simply import all of the feeds with a few clicks.

Google also expanded its comment feature by releasing it to all non-English users and added the ability to share notes via Google Reader’s mobile interface. In addition, they released a new video tutorial and start page for new Google Reader users.

These small changes reflect two of the biggest trends in social media today: simplicity and social graph interaction. Comments and Friends Trends are both features that help you better connect with and understand friends, while iGoogle importing and the new user start page are attempts to lower the time and energy cost of starting with Google Reader. Hopefully all of these moves indicate that Google Reader isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

(Via Mashable!.)