Reading gets personal with Popular items and Personalized ranking

Thursday, October 22, 2009 by Beverly Yang

(Cross-posted with the Official Google Blog)

Today, we're launching two changes to Google Reader to help you discover more interesting content faster. Just as the launch of Personalized Search improved search results based on your search history, these changes use your Reader Trends to improve your reading experience.

• Explore section - We're always trying to help you discover new stuff in Reader, and today we're introducing "Popular items" and "Recommended sources", two ways to find interesting content from all over the Internet. We use algorithms to find top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions), collect them in the new Popular items section and order them by what we think you'll like best. Now you don't have to be embarrassed about missing that hilarious video everyone is talking about — it should show up in your "Popular items" feed automatically. And to make it easier to find interesting feeds, we're moving recommendations into the new Explore section and giving it a new name — "Recommended sources." Like always, it uses your Reader Trends and Web History (if you're opted into Web History) to generate a list of feeds we think you might like.

  

• Personalized ranking - Only have a 10 minute coffee break and want to see the best items first? All feeds now have a new sort option called "magic" that re-orders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order. Click "Sort by magic" under the "Feed settings" menu of your feed (or folder) to switch to personalized ranking. Unlike the old "auto" ranking, this new ranking is personalized for you, and gets better with time as we learn what you like best — the more you "like" and "share" stuff, the better your magic sort will be. Give it a try on a high-volume feed folder or All items and see for yourself!

  

The goal of personalization at Google remains the same as ever: to help you find the best content on the web. We hope these new features help you do just that — go Explore for yourself.

Finally, we'd love to hear your feedback — share your thoughts on our help group, Twitter or the Reader section of Get Satisfaction, a third party support community.

Calling All Ideas!

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 by Nick

The Google Reader team often looks to you, our users, for feedback on the changes we've implemented as well as for help determining our priorities for the future. In that spirit, we're excited to announce the launch of Product Ideas for Google Reader: a tool that allows you to submit your best ideas directly to the Google Reader team and to other Google Reader users.

Have you ever had an idea that would make Google Reader better, more efficient, or just more fun to use? Using Product Ideas, you can submit your idea as well as read suggestions from other users - and best of all, you can vote on the ideas submitted and browse the highest-ranked ideas. We'll get a chance to see and respond directly to the ideas that you, our users, are most excited about.

In addition to submitting product ideas, you can also post links to your own favorite custom bundles and Send To links as well as browse links submitted by others. Using Product Ideas, you'll easily be able to see (and subscribe to!) the highest rated bundles and Send To links as well as expose your own content to a whole new group of Reader users just like you.

Give it a try! Submit some suggestions and your favorite bundles and Send To links and, as always, let us know what you think.

Looking for great stuff to read?

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 by Zach Yeskel

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

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 by Brian Shih

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

Wednesday, August 05, 2009 by Mihai Parparita

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.

A hearty welcome to NewsGator users

Thursday, July 30, 2009 by Brian Shih

A little while back, our friends over at NewsGator told us that lots of people who use their client RSS readers like FeedDemon and NetNewsWire had been asking for the ability to synchronize with Google Reader, since maintaining two separate subscription lists was a hassle. Today, we're happy to report that we've worked with NewsGator to make this possible, and new versions of their client readers released today will use Google Reader as the synchronization backend. If you use one of these applications, check out NewsGator's instructions and FAQ on transitioning your subscriptions.

Now that Google Reader can be used as the online companion to NewsGator's client applications, they've decided to discontinue consumer use of NewsGator Online, their free web-based RSS reader, at the end of August. If you've been using this service, you'll need to transition your subscriptions to Google Reader. To do this, all you need to is a Google account (you already have one if you use Gmail), and here's a video to help you get started. To those of you who have been waiting for this integration and to those of you who are using Reader for the first time, welcome!

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback in our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.

Customize your mobile Reader experience

Thursday, July 23, 2009 by Mihai Parparita

Reader's mobile interface for smartphones (iPhones, Android-based devices, and the Palm Pre) is a handy way to keep up with your subscriptions on the go. We realized that we've never officially talked about the settings page for the mobile interface, so here's a quick rundown of the ways in which you can customize your Reader experience to suit your tastes (on your phone, you can find this page by looking for the "Settings" link at the bottom of the screen).

• Start page: Choose which folder or view you'd like to see when you first log in.
• Link reformatting: Though smartphone browsers can generally render any webpage well, you may still want to reformat webpage (removing most styles and compressing images) if you're on a low-bandwidth connection.
• Links in new window: By default Reader will open links in new windows, but if you prefer you can open them in the same window, replacing Reader.
• Items per page:^New! Reader normally displays 15 items at a time, but if you have a fast connection or if wish to blast through more items at a time, you can choose to display even more.

We got the idea for the last setting from a blog post, so please keep the feedback coming, whether via blogs, our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.

P.S. Speaking of settings, we've added a checkbox that those of you that are not big fans of liking may appreciate.