Google Reader on your Google Desktop

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 by Brian Shih

The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: a Reader Google Desktop gadget! Post by 20% volunteer and Google Desktop expert, James Yum.

Wherever there are gadgets, RSS feed readers are never lacking, and Google Desktop gadgets are no exception. Until now, there hasn't been a good way to combine all your feeds into a single gadget. With the new Google Reader gadget, you can now track your feeds and Google Reader subscriptions directly from your desktop. The Google Reader gadget is designed to be familiar for existing Reader users, yet compact like our other Desktop gadgets.

To get started, download the gadget (you might need to install Google Desktop first) and sign-in to your Google account. If you select a subscription, your gadget will update automatically with new posts. Clicking an item opens a larger view where you can see the item preview and perform familiar actions such as star, share, and email. Due to a technical limitation of Google Desktop gadgets, full HTML feeds won't render fully, but clicking on an item title will take you to the original website in your browser.

The Google Reader gadget runs with the latest Linux and Windows releases of Google Desktop gadgets and is open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. We hope this gadget is a fun and useful way to access your Google Reader subscriptions. Please give it a try and tell us what you think.

"Life is a great bundle of little things"

Thursday, May 21, 2009 by Brad Hawkes

Have you ever had a friend you just knew would love your three favorite blogs about education policy? Do you know all the best sources for celebrity gossip? Or maybe a friend who knows where to get the best baseball commentary? If you've ever wanted to share your favorite feeds, now you can create custom bundles and share them with just a few clicks.

To get started, click "Browse for stuff" and create your own bundle.

Simply drag some of your subscriptions -- or even folders -- to your bundle, add a title and description, and click "Save". Just like Reader's other sharing features, bundles you create can be automatically shared with your Reader friends. You can also email your bundles or post them to your blog. You can even browse all of your friends' bundles -- who knows, maybe one of your buddies is actually an expert in gluten-free cooking.

To get this party started, here are some bundles the Reader team has come up with.

• All about the Google Reader team
• Airplanes
• Make stuff. Take pictures of it.
• Economics in World of Warcraft
• Make your house a home
• Favorite recipe sources
• Everything you've ever wanted to know about Jon Wiley
• Twilight overload

Try making your own bundle. And feel free to leave us some feedback via Twitter or the help group.

Post title quote attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Latest round of Reader improvements

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by Mihai Parparita

The Google Reader team has just finished releasing a new version of Reader with a bunch of small changes and tweaks that we thought you'd like to know about.

If you've added enough friends in Reader that you're feeling overwhelmed, we're here to help. We've added a new set of tabs to the trends page called "Friends trends." This way you can see which of your friends share the most, and whose shared items you actually get around to reading.

In other social-related news, we're continuing to iterate on our comments feature. With this release, comments are now available to our non-English users. Additionally, item sources are now visible in the comment view and it's easier to mark items as read there.

Another area that we've focused on improving is the new user experience; we know that a fully armed and operational Reader account can help users go through a large amount of information very quickly, but getting to that point can be daunting. We've recently released a revamped new user page that tries to help with that. In addition to a welcome video and a tutorial, it also tries to help you get started by pointing out the kinds of feeds that you can subscribe to. Our most recent addition to this is the ability to import feeds from iGoogle. This way if you're trying out Reader and already have a heavily customized iGoogle account, your feeds are just a click away.

We've also made improvements to our mobile interface. You can now post notes if an interesting thought occurs to you while waiting in line. For those of you with Android phones, we've also fixed a particularly annoying bug that led to items not being marked as read correctly.

A lot of these changes were made in response to user feedback. Whether it's via Twitter, blogs or our discussion group, please keep it coming.

Meeting friends of friends

Monday, May 04, 2009 by Nick

About two months ago we enabled commenting on your friends' shared items. Today, we're happy to introduce some changes to how commenting works, including the ability to start sharing with any of the people who comment on your friends' shared items.

Have you ever read a comment on a friend's shared item and wondered who that person was? In the past, there hasn't been a way to interact with these people besides reading their comments on your friends' shared items. Not anymore!

By hovering over the name of an unfamiliar commenter you can see their profile picture and the links they've added to their Google Profile. Furthermore, you can click the "Start sharing" link to start sharing your shared items with that person!

This is a great way to add new people to your friends list. When that person next logs in, they'll see an option to view your shared items as well as the option to start sharing with you. If they reciprocate, you'll have a new friend in your Reader.

We've also made comments more visible and more flexible from within Reader. Now, you'll be able to see comments on shared items while viewing All items. You'll also be notified when new comments are made by the small speech bubble icon in your left sidebar, even when your Friends' shared items module is collapsed. While making comments, your options for formatting have been increased. Try using asterisks or underscores to spice up your comments with bold and italic text.

Note: You can stop sharing your items with someone at any time by visiting the Sharing settings link in your left sidebar. Also, if someone chooses to share with you, your shared items are not visible to that person unless you consent. Finally, the "start sharing" link in profile cards will also only appear to those users sharing with friends, and not those sharing only with chat buddies.

Google Reader is your new watercooler

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 by Jenna Bilotta

One of the things that we love best about Reader is the ability to easily share interesting items with your friends. In fact, we like it so much that we've been adding bunches of new sharing features over the last year including choosing friends to share with, sharing with note and the sharing bookmarklet. But we quickly realized that one of the most important pieces of the sharing cycle was missing: the ability to have conversations with friends about all those shared items.

With our new conversation feature, you can have private discussions on shared items with your friends. Now, instead of obsessively asking everyone in your office if they have seen that awesome lego cake article you shared last night, they can tell you how awesome you are, right within Google Reader!

What's new with this feature:

• You can comment on any items that you share or that have been shared by your friends.
  
• In order to keep track of conversations, you can check out the new "Comment view" which is optimized for tracking conversations and commenting. Comment view is a little different from your normal reading mode because it sorts the list of items by most recent comment. When there are new comments, the "Comment view" link will appear as bold. You can even read the full text of the items in this view by clicking the "Expand this item" (which will mark it as read).
  
• If you see a comment icon on top of a friend's profile picture in list or expanded view, it means there are comments on that item (this helps you decide what to read first.)
• When more than one of your friends share the same item, you'll see a separate conversation under each person who shared it, together in the same view.
• And don't forget, you can always read and add comments on your iPhone.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Comments can only be seen by friends of the person who originally shared the item.
• Comments are not yet available in the "All items" view.
• We have much more planned for this feature, but we would love to hear what you think, too.
• Currently, you cannot comment on items in a shared items subscription or on a shared tag; comments can only be made on items shared by friends.
• This release is English-only for now.

We are super excited to bring you this feature, and have plans to keep improving it in the near future. So, find some friends that use Reader, find some cool stuff to share, and join the conversation. Happy commenting!

SXSW 2009 Party: Reader, Blogger, and You

Saturday, March 07, 2009 by Brian Shih

It's about that time of year again! If you're heading down to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest, we hope you can join us and our friends from Blogger for a little party. Come, drink, and meet the fine folks behind Google Reader. We may even have a few things for early arrivals...

• Where: Six Lounge - 117 W 4th St @ Colorado (map)
• When: Sunday, March 15th from 10pm - 1am

Bring an SXSW Interactive Badge, or find one of us or the Blogger team at the conference for an invitation. We'll be donning some schwag, so keep an eye out.

Hope to see you there, and don't forget to follow googlereader on Twitter for any updates!

What we did on our winter break

Thursday, January 29, 2009 by Mihai Parparita

After our big launch of the new look and feel, the Reader team took a breather and worked on tying up loose ends (don't worry, we also took some time off). We've just pushed a new release that includes the following set of fixes and tweaks:

• Improvements to our rich mobile interface for iPhone, Android and other browsers, including a more compact page header, visual alignment tweaks and a faster loading time.
• Links on the home page giving you easy access to your recently read and kept unread items.
• Fixes for some "stuck" unread count issues.
• Better handling of feeds and items with malformed URLs.
• Less flickering when using the "Share with note" bookmark.
• Fixing of errors when deleting lots of tags and folders.
• Removal of extra image and backend requests, resulting in slightly faster loading times.

One other recent change is that we're now on Twitter. We've been fans of Twitter Search as a way of gathering feedback, but now we have a way of talking back. Feel free to send an @googlereader tweet to get our attention, and follow us for updates and quips.

Finally, we were honored to be nominated for a Bloggie. We encourage you to take a look at all the nominees in all the categories, it's a collection of some really great, subscribe-worthy, blogs