Get your Blogger following fix (in Reader)

8/28/2008 05:52:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Our friends on the Blogger team just launched Following. Blogger users can now "follow" blogs they like, giving them an easy way keep up with their favorite blogs, and allowing authors to see who their readership is.

Better yet, followed blogs also show up in your Reader account, in their own folder. That way you can get the full power of Reader's tagging, sharing and starring without having to maintain two separate reading lists. Of course, if you'd rather not see followed blogs in Reader, there's a setting to hide them.

We hope you'll have fun playing with Blogger's new social feature. And if following brings you to Reader for the first time, welcome!

Read what they read

8/18/2008 10:03:00 AM

Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager

The Reader team has always been interested in politics, and we use Reader (of course) to stay current on all the political happenings. As we were reading and sharing amongst ourselves, it got us thinking: what would happen if political newsmakers used Reader too?

Today we're announcing Google Power Readers in Politics: leading political journalists and both U.S. presidential campaigns using Reader to read and share news. You can read what they read, and see what's on their minds as they share and discuss news. Each participant has created a reading list with a feed you can subscribe to in Reader (or any other feed reader), and is also publishing shared items. Here's the list of participants:

• Obama and McCain campaigns
• Mike Allen, POLITICO
• Chuck DeFeo, Townhall
• John Dickerson, Slate
• Mark Halperin, TIME
• Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post
• Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
• Jon Meacham, Newsweek
• Patrick Ruffini, The Next Right

Visit http://www.google.com/powerreaders to get an overview, and subscribe to what you're most interested in using Reader. We're excited to see what's newsworthy this election season - we hope you will be too!

Pick your friends!

8/13/2008 01:30:00 PM

Posted by Dolapo Falola, Software Engineer

Today we're excited to announce several improvements in the way sharing works in Reader. You've given us lots of feedback on the way our experimental sharing features work and we heard you loud and clear: you want more control over your sharing. We've been working hard to create a more flexible way to let you choose who to share with; you can now manage a Friends list within Reader, separate from your Gmail chat contacts.

To get started, you can choose to either continue sharing with all of your chat buddies or create a custom Friends list with those that you hand-select.

People that you add to the Friends list will be able to automatically see your shared items in Reader (remember, shared items always have a public URL).

We've also made it easy to manage who shares with you. When someone decides to share with you, you will get a notification and the ability to preview and subscribe to their shared items. At that time, you can also choose to share your items with them (or not).

We hope that this increases the flexibility and control you have over who you share with. We always love to hear your feedback as we continue to improve the sharing experience in Reader.