Looking for great stuff to read?

8/25/2009 01:27:00 PM

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

Where do Arianna Huffington and Thomas Friedman go to get different perspectives on the news? Which economics sites does Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman read? What sites and blogs do the editors of Lifehacker, Boing Boing and Kottke read?

These questions have always interested us, so we decided to approach leaders across a variety of fields and ask them what they read online. We got lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies, and more. We hope this will be a good place for you to find more great things to read, whether you're new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list. Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and subscribe to any of the participants' reading lists, or to any individual sites and blogs they recommend.

All these reading lists were built using Reader's new custom bundles, and we encourage you to create and share your own reading lists for your areas of expertise.

A big thanks to all of our contributors:

News: Thomas Friedman (New York Times), Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post), Michelle Malkin (Hot Air), Paul Krugman (New York Times), Patrick Ruffini (The Next Right), Nicholas Kristof (New York Times), John Dickerson (Slate), Dexter Filkins (New York Times), Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos), Charles Blow (New York Times)
Tech and web: Chris Anderson (Wired), Adam Pash (Lifehacker), Mark Frauenfelder (Boing Boing), Alex Papadimoulis (The Daily WTF), Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land), Jason Kottke (Kottke.org), Annalee Newitz (io9), Meaghan O’Neill (Treehugger), Ben Popken (The Consumerist)
Food and health: Mark Bittman (New York Times), Béatrice Peltre (La Tartine Gourmande), Faith Durand (Apartment Therapy: The Kitchn), Tara Parker-Pope (New York Times)
Trends and fashion: Abby Gardner (Fashionista), Cathy Horyn (New York Times), Danielle de Lange (The Style Files), Carrie Leber (Bloomacious)

We'd love to hear your feedback – please head over to our help group, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.

A flurry of features for feed readers

8/12/2009 05:00:00 PM

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Since our last big launch, we've been thinking about ways to help our users better share, discover, and consume content in Reader. Today, I'm happy to announce several new features that we hope will further improve the way you use Reader.

Send to...
We've made it easier to share posts you like to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, and more, with our new "Send to" feature. (Incidentally, Blogger is celebrating its tenth birthday this month, and we're hoping our friends there will like this little birthday present.)
Just head over to the settings page, and enable the services you want to use. If your favorite service isn't listed (and you're feeling extra geeky), you can create your own "Send to" link with a URL template.

To share an item on one of your sites, simply click the "Send to" button and choose your service. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, "shift-t" will do the same.

Feeds from people you follow
When we added following, we tried to make it easier to find and follow people who share similar interests. Now we've gone even further, and made it possible for you to subscribe directly to the blogs, photos, or Twitter updates that anyone you're following has included on their Google profile.

To quickly subscribe to these sites, click the "From people you follow" tab on the "Browse for stuff" page.

More control for mark all as read
We know people can be overwhelmed by too many unread items, and sometimes only want to see recent posts. The "Mark all as read" button now has a menu that lets you choose to only mark items as read if they're older than your specified time frame. A tip of the hat to Nick Bradbury who pioneered this "panic button" feature.

Finally, a few small tweaks in this release:

• When you expand an item in comment view, you now get the full set of actions, enabling you to share, like, and star items without leaving comment view.
• We added a "Feeds" start-page option for the iPhone/Android/Pre mobile interface, so you can see a list of your subscriptions when you sign in.
• There is now an option to show notes when embedding your shared items on other pages as clips.

As always, if you have feedback, please head over to our help group, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.

PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items

8/05/2009 02:13:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Speed is very important at Google, and the Reader team is no exception. One way in which we take speed into account is to try to make consumption of feeds be as efficient as possible. We also want to make it as fast (and as easy) as possible to interact with your Reader data on the rest of the web.

We're therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there's a <link rel="hub" .../> element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.

One place that takes advantage of this pinging is FriendFeed. This means if you have added your shared items to your FriendFeed account, you and your friends will see them there within a few seconds the "Share" link being pressed in Reader (special thanks to FriendFeeder Benjamin Golub for making sure the experience was as smooth as possible). You can see this in action in FriendFeed's search results and in the screencast below:

Adding PubSubHubbub support was a 20% project between Brad Fitzpatrick, Brett Slatkin, and myself, each of us working in our spare time over the past couple of weeks. Adding PubSubHubbub to your application is definitely a low-effort but high-payoff way of making the Web faster and more efficient. And if you have any questions or feedback about PubSubHubbub support, you can reach us on our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.