Attack of the 20%'ers

11/06/2007 05:22:00 PM

At Google, 20% time is core to our culture and today's Reader release incorporates features developed by two engineers in their 20% time. Those two engineers would be us!

Steve Lacey: As a blogger I like to include a blogroll on my site so that friends, family and other readers can take a look at what I like to read. It's also a nice way to give a shout out to the authors of the blogs that I like. However, maintaining a blogroll can be a bit of a pain as your subscriptions ebb and flow.

As a heavy user of Google Reader, I figured that the best way to get a blogroll would be to have Reader generate it for me, based on my subscriptions. This didn't seem to hard, so I chatted to the Reader team and then set about implementing a this feature in my 20% time.

Well, now it's ready for prime time! Head over to the "Tags" section on the settings page, make one of the tags you use for subscriptions public, and click on "add a blogroll to your site." For an example, head over to my personal blog, and you can see my blogroll in action over on the right.

20% time is such a wonderful thing. As well as being able to actually implement my own wishlist in another Google product, I get to play around with technologies that I might not use day-to-day. As a backend engineer, mucking around in frontend code can be refreshing...

Dolapo Falola: One of my favorite Google Reader features is the ability to read feeds on my mobile phone. I'm a New Yorker so I'm out and about quite a bit without a computer. Whether it's sitting on a bus or waiting for a table for brunch, Reader provides a way for me to stay informed on news, or to just kill time whenever I can get a cellular or WiFi signal.

As Steve mentioned, 20% time lets Googlers who aren't necessarily working on Reader contribute features. I've been taking advantage of this opportunity to add small (pun intended) features to Google Reader Mobile. Some of the more interesting features I've added are the ability to see trends data on which feeds are viewed on mobile, as well as the ability to change the number of items displayed at once, or disable reformatting linked web sites for mobile phones. The latter in particular is especially useful for iPhone and other smart phones that are capable of properly displaying sites.

This release also includes some additional changes for iPhone users. While the functionality is the same as previous versions, we've changed the user interface to make it easier to navigate and select often-used links. We've also moved the navigational buttons to the top, since it's easy to return to the top of the page by just tapping on the status bar. Enjoy.

It's also probably worth mentioning that as of last week, I'm no longer a 20%'er but a full-fledged 80%'er on the Reader team — working in my 20% time provided me with the perfect way to test the waters and eventually switch projects.

Subscriber Stats, Summed Up

10/15/2007 08:35:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

There's been a lot of discussion this weekend about the subscriber counts that have recently appeared in Reader's search results. Leaderboards have been drawn up, numbers are being compared and in some cases there's confusion as to how these numbers compare with other subscriber metrics. Additionally, we've made changes (some as recently as today) as to how counts are being calculated. This is probably going to be pretty boring unless you're a feed publisher, but we thought it would be best to explain things a bit. Here are the various numbers you may come across, and what they all mean:

Google subscriber counts: These numbers include subscribers across all Google services, including Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. You can see them in Reader's feed search results (pictured below) and the Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, our crawler reports them to the publisher each time we fetch the feed. Reader's feed search was recently showing stale and incomplete data, but as of today (October 15) the numbers should be the same everywhere.

FeedBurner numbers: If you use FeedBurner to manage and track your feed, you will see a subscriber count there that is attributed to "Google Feedfetcher." This number is a sum of all the feeds that you have redirecting to your FeedBurner feed URL. So if http://www.example.com/atom.xml has 3 subscribers, http://www.example.com/rss.xml has 7 subscribers and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Example (where you redirect the other two feeds now) has 12 subscribers, then you will see 3 + 7 + 12 = 22 subscribers reported in the FeedBurner interface.

What this all means if you're a feed publisher is that if you're interested in getting the most comprehensive overview of your subscribers, you should be using a service like FeedBurner or Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand, if you're a Reader user, we hope you take advantage of the numbers that we now show next to search results, so that you can pick the most appropriate feed to subscribe to.

Breaking up isn't hard to do

9/17/2007 11:00:00 PM

Posted by Kevin Systrom, Product Marketing Manager

Dear "Labs",

We don't know how to tell you this, but it's time that we break up. It's just that we're different now. People can search. They can share what they read. They can even see trends about what they read, and how often they do it. There are all sorts of things we could do in the future to make feed reading awesome. And that means you just can't be around anymore.

But don't be sad. We'll always remember the good times: our first date, when we rolled out the new user-interface together, and the way sometimes we could just sit there and not talk at all because you are just a label.

When we get all teary-eyed and reminiscent we might even put on that mix tape you made us; the one with Paula Cole and Guster. We'll think of you.

Today is a big day for us. We learned to speak some new languages. And frankly, you don't translate well. But we both speak English, and we know that "u" and "I" are far apart in the alphabet. We're farther in real life.

It's not you. It's us.

Love always,

The Google Reader Team

Image based on a photo by CarbonNYC.

"We found it!"

9/05/2007 09:21:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Here's a search box:

Doesn't seem all that special, does it? Most Google sites have it. But let's look at where it is:

That's right, search is finally in Google Reader. Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you'd like to search for "ipod" so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today's announcements.

Search lets you use keywords to find items in your subscriptions (if you're looking to search all blogs, give Blog Search a try). If you subscribe to someone's shared items, it'll search those too. This handy feature is brought to you especially by Ben and Chris's tireless engineering work and Jenna's relentless iteration on user interface concepts.

Along for the ride in the search release are a few other Reader tweaks. You can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. Unread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. Finally, Reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you've navigated to.

If you'd like to let us know how search is working out for you, or have any other Reader feedback, you can use our shiny new forums to get in touch.

Doing the Shuffle

6/22/2007 06:31:00 AM

Posted by Nick Baum, Product Manager

Some of our users, like Robert Scoble, can go through 600 feeds in less time than it takes to say "mark all as read":

(Thanks Tim for this video!)

For those of you who don't have supernatural powers and would like a quick and easy way to go through your Google Reader subscriptions, we want to highlight one of our lesser-known features: the "Next" bookmarklet.

The "Next" bookmarklet allows you to use Google Reader through just one link -- clicking on it takes your browser to the next unread item in your reading list (marking it as read in the process). I like to use it to go through my photoblog folder. It's also useful for subscriptions that only include snippets, or when I want to read an article in context.

You can find the "Next" bookmarklet on the Settings page under the Goodies tab. Give it a try, and go from j-j-j to next-next-next!

Today's outage

6/11/2007 05:36:00 PM

Posted by Ben Darnell, Software Engineer

This afternoon we experienced a brief outage, during which about half our users seemed to lose their subscriptions. This can happen when one of the many complex systems that power Google Reader experiences a glitch. We work hard to avoid problems of any kind, but occasionally something like this happens. The good news is that no data was actually lost, it was just temporarily inaccessible. Google's systems store data redundantly to minimize the chance of anything becoming permanently lost.

We were able to identify, diagnose, and fix today's outage within an hour, which is the kind of response time that we strive for. We'll continue give quick status updates to problems like this in the future so users who have trusted us with their data can feel comfortable doing so.

On the menu

6/06/2007 03:51:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Sometimes we come across Reader-related things that are interesting enough that we'd like to post about them on our blog, but at the same time too small to base a whole post around. Enough of these tidbits have piled up to build a whole meal, so we thought we'd just share them with you, one link at a time.

Video Appetizers

Reader is centered around subscribing to feeds, but it's not always easy to explain to others what feeds are, who makes them, and why you'd want to subscribe to them. Worse yet, sometimes they're "feeds" and sometimes they're "RSS" -- and what is this "Atom" thing anyway? This RSS in Plain English video does a good job of explaining all that, in a very unique style.

Also on the topic of videos, Chris made a short clip showing all the places he's used his offline Reader. If you or anyone you know would like to know just why you'd Google Gears-enable an application, this showcases it pretty well:

For a more in-depth discussion of Gears and Reader, you can watch Aaron Boodman's presentation from Google Developer Day.

Embedding Entrées

Many folks like our gadget, but sometimes wish even more of Reader's features could be accessed from within iGoogle. With Michael Bolin's Your Page Here gadget, you can embed all of Reader (or any other page, for that matter) as its own tab within your iGoogle page.

For all you Facebook users, Mario Romero has created a Reader application that allows you to embed your shared items into Facebook profile. It's a bit finick-y (you have to type in your 20-digit Reader ID), but it shows how open platforms (Reader's and Facebook's) can be used together without needing permission from either party.

Fun Desserts

We've posted before about add-ons that others have made for Reader, but they've generally been of a functional nature (like notifiers and browser buttons). The Google Reader Theme that Jon Hicks made is entirely unlike that in that it doesn't add any functionality, it just makes Reader look very different (some might say Mac-like). A fresh face for Reader can be a lot of fun, and we were happy to see just how seamless Jon managed to make it.

Finally, if Reader is just too serious for you and you'd like to view your feeds through a lolcat perspective, Ian McKellar's LOL Feeds may be the thing for you.

Oh Sam I Am, can I read it on the tram?

5/31/2007 12:08:00 AM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

Things you can't bring with you on an airplane: Bottled water. Organic shampoo. Google Reader.

I'm happy to announce that our team has fixed one of these problems. Although we find the business of mini bottled water intriguing (and cute!), we've decided to stick to our core business: feeding your reading habit.

As of today, you can use Google Reader offline. Now you can access your favorite feeds in the Golden Gate Park, on the chinatown express, or even traveling 35,000 ft above the Atlantic.

To do this, we've used the newly released Google Gears, a browser plugin that enables offline web applications. Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

A small note of warning: the current version of Google Gears is a developer release. Given this, you may notice a few kinks here and there, but we'll be working hard to iron those out over the coming months. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions as we look to make Google Reader better every day.

Feed Your Television

5/08/2007 06:42:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Earlier this year, I acquired a Nintendo Wii. As I was recovering from Wii elbow, I began to explore the capabilities of the Opera-based Internet Channel. It occurred that Reader may be a lot of fun on the Wii, especially with many photo and video feeds.

Some weekend hacking confirmed my suspicions, and the rest of the team also seemed to think it'd be a neat side project. As some have discovered, we recently flipped the switch on this feature. If you'd like to try it out, simply visit reader.google.com on your Wii (you may find it even easier to just do a Google search for "reader"). Keep in mind that this is something very experimental, the labs of Google Labs if you will.

If you're curious to see what it looks like, here's a recording:

You'll also notice that Reader on the Wii takes advantage of the famous Wiimote:

• up/down: scroll up/down
• right/left: next/previous item
• 1 button: show subscriptions
• 2 button: show links

When showing subscriptions:

• up/down: previous/next subscription
• right: select current subscription
• left: close
• -/+: collapse/expand folder

If you'd like to try the Reader interface in a regular browser, visit www.google.com/reader/wii to go into Wii mode. The Wiimote buttons all have keyboard equivalents (e.g. the "1" key for the 1 button).

Now that this is done, I've heard that the Commodore 64 has a web browser...

There are people who don't use feed readers?

5/02/2007 03:00:00 PM

Posted by Brad Hawkes, Software Engineer

It's fun to share interesting items with your friends and coworkers. Google Reader has a "Share" button and a public page to go along with it, and some people have been putting that to great use. Once you start sharing, others can subscribe to your shared items and see what you see (when you want them to).

This works great for your feed-savvy friends. But, what if you want to share something you find in Reader with someone who doesn't use a feed reader at all?

To the rescue comes a greatly improved email feature we're releasing today. Even Marge Simpson has email, so interesting feed items you come across can now reach almost anyone.

Now, clicking the "Email" link at the bottom of an item gives you the ability to:

• send email from within Reader -- no more second window for sending email.
• send the entire item as it appears in Reader, including formatting and images.
• use your Gmail address book (if you have one) to add contacts with auto-complete.

So, there you have it. Now you can share the great content from your feeds with anyone. Give it a try and let us know how you like it.

Go Go (Reader) Gadget

4/06/2007 09:00:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

There are many ways to get your Reader fix. You can use our full interface. You can use your cellphone. You can even "Next" your way across the web with our bookmarklet. But one of the more popular ways to check your reading list is with our Personalized Homepage gadget.

Based on the comments that the gadget is receiving at the directory, we've made quite a few improvements to it:

• A "mark all as read" link so you can more easily catch up
• Unread counts for your reading list and tags
• Better support for themes
• The ability to sort items oldest-first

If you'd like to see other features in the Reader gadget, just add another comment. And if you haven't added it to your homepage yet, you can do so with this button:

Your (Growing) Google Reader Team

3/20/2007 10:52:00 AM

Posted by Brad Hawkes, Software Engineer

As Google Reader has grown, so has its engineering team. As the newest member of the Reader team, I am excited to be working with all of the great people who spend their days making the world a better place for reading feeds. I originally started working on Reader as an intern during the summer of 2006. That experience was a ton of fun and a great way to learn. Working as an intern also allowed me to work with people who are some of the best in the tech industry. After that experience I was very happy to come on full-time. For those of you who are interested in looking into the internship program you can find information here: Internship Information. Google is always looking for the best and brightest engineers. Who knows, you might even get to work on Reader.

During a recent planning session, we realized we had never taken a group picture. So I whipped out my Canon Digital Rebel and the result is below. From left to right, in order, we have: me (Brad), Mihai, Susan, Kevin, Steve, Nick, Chris, Ben and Justin.

So now there is evidence that we were all in the same room at least once.

One subscriber, two subscribers, three...

2/16/2007 06:16:00 AM

Posted by Justin Haugh, Software Engineer

When building a product, your top priority should always be the needs of your users. Here on the Google Reader team, we pride ourselves in being responsive to the complaints and feature requests of those who read feeds using our service. Today, though, we're announcing a feature for a different group: the publishers of those feeds.

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we've been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

If you have access to your server logs, you can see the count directly in the HTTP header of our requests (read more in our FAQ). For an easier solution, you can use a web analytics service such as FeedBurner to get a detailed breakdown of your subscribers from a variety of feed readers (it may take a day or two for our stats to show up in their interface, so don't worry if they're not there yet).

While you're at it, you may want to take a look at the new Google Reader for Publishers page. It has some helpful tips to ensure the best experience for your subscribers. Among other things, it explains feed best practices, common implementation pitfalls, and various ways to promote your feeds.

We intend to develop more features for feed publishers, so let us know what would be most useful to you.

By Bloggers For Bloggers

2/01/2007 01:40:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Reader has always been about sharing your favorite items. One of the more fun things you can do with them is put them on your blog. That way your readers can see what you've been finding interesting, even if you don't have the time to do full posts.

Until now, putting your shared items in your blog required some technical chops, since you needed to copy and paste some code into your template. We'd always wanted to make this easier, so we worked with our friends on the Blogger team. As a result, the entire process now only takes a few clicks for Blogger users*.

All you have to do is click the "Add to Blogger" button on the put a clip on your site page in Reader (found in Settings). Now anytime you share something, your blog's readers will know about it too. It's more fun than a blogroll and always up to date.

* Just to be clear, this only works if you've upgraded to the new version of Blogger. We switched the Reader blog to it a few weeks ago, and it's been working out great (no more waiting for publishing to finish).

Getting embedded in Google Reader.

1/30/2007 11:29:00 AM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

We have another small update to Reader regarding video. Reader should now show videos from YouTube and Google Video (and a few other sites) that you have embedded in your blog posts and articles. Some advice on how not to go about filming a feature announcement is included below. (Shot at Sundance Film Festival, too late for awards submission.)

We didn't want this to be just a Google thing, however, so we also currently support videos from other sites like MySpace, Jumpcut, Grouper, IFILM, Metacafe, Revver, Vimeo, vSocial, and games from Monsters and Critics. If your favorite site isn't listed, please tell us in the Reader group and we'll look into adding support, if possible.

Update on 2/7/2007: We now also support Odeo, Yahoo! Video, Brightcove, Dailymotion, blip.tv and MSN Soapbox embedded players.

Some of our engineers don't work at Google

1/17/2007 12:04:00 PM

Posted by Nick Baum, Product Manager

One of the most useful aspects of feed readers is how easy they make it to keep track of industry news. Which in my case means using Google Reader to read about... Google Reader. For example, I subscribe to the Google Blogsearch for "Google Reader" (which has a feed) so I know whenever someone writes about our product.

In the TV show 24, everything is not as it seems. Similarly, not everything that can be done with Reader is visible at first glance. I thought I'd share some gems that were unearthed with the help of the Blogsearch feed.

• Mitch Keeler has posted a great guide of various external tools that people have written for Google Reader, including notifiers, greasemonkey scripts and more.
• For those of you with Wordpress blogs, Mike Crute has written a Wordpress plugin to add his shared items to his template.
• John Tokash is developing Reader Mini, an interface optimized for Nokia Internet Tablets.
• Lots of people have been posting their Trends statistics: Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble, O'Reilly Radar and more. Jeff Veen, who helped us out with the design, has also posted some follow-up thoughts.

The Google Reader team tries to read all the feedback that gets posted on blogs, and has also been known to reply in comments. This is a great way for us to get a feel for what's important to you, so keep writing up your thoughts and feature suggestions. There's also our Google Group if you'd like to report more specific issues.

I like big charts and I cannot lie

1/03/2007 04:03:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

I've always been a big fan of charts, tables and other ways of analyzing and visualizing data. On my own blog I will often plot things just to get a handle on them. Even here I've posted some analyses that I've done of the data that the Reader team has on hand. It's therefore no surprise that my favorite blog of 2006 is Data Mining.

With this in mind, I've always wondered how I could apply this interest to Reader's feature set. It then occurred to me that there were plenty of things that could be dug up about the items that a person reads and the feeds they are subscribed to. Perhaps some feeds post very often but don't actually get read, so they may as well be removed. Conversely, other sites may not have updated in ages, so they're just taking up room in the list of subscriptions.

Playing around with these ideas, I created a simple Reader "trends" page, inspired by Google Trends as well as the Search History Trends page. After showing it to the rest of the Reader team and a few other interested Googlers, I began to gather feedback and implemented it. Most helpful was when Jeff and Doug rolled up their sleeves and applied some of the same thinking that went into Measure Map to this new Reader page. This went beyond just making things pretty; they helped make things easier to digest and understand.

The result is the Reader Trends page, accessed via a link from the "Home" page. For example, it lets me see the spike in read items two days ago (the result of my New Year's resolution of staying on top of my 322 subscriptions). There are also my subscriptions sorted by various criteria, so I can see which I'm having trouble keeping up with. Each subscription has a unsubscribe icon next to it, which I've used for those that I decided were not worth keeping around.

If you have any New Year's resolutions about time management or are a chart geek like me, trends should be useful and fun. You may discover things about your reading habits that you didn't know.

Dwelling on the past

12/14/2006 06:45:00 PM

Posted by Justin Haugh, Software Engineer

As a backend engineer, one of my favorite features of Google Reader is its ability to track the history of a feed over time. Reader takes a snapshot of feeds periodically and saves the content, so you can see posts that are days or weeks old. It's a neat way to read the web; in a way, it lets you look back in time. Combined with Reader's ability to track what you have and haven't read, you can safely jet off to Tahiti for a few weeks and never miss a post.

Ideally, though, you'd like to catch up on those posts in the order they were written. That's why we're releasing one of our most requested features: sorting by oldest-first. Now you can read those Lost episode summaries in the right order after you've shook the sand out of your shoes. It's available in the view settings menu, so you can select it only for the feeds or folders you prefer.

Careful observers will note that we've also added sort by auto to view settings. This nifty feature mixes feeds together according to posting frequency, so items from rarely-updated feeds (your friend's blog) show up higher than items from frequently-updated feeds like The New York Times. Look for this feature to evolve over time as we try to find other ways of highlighting the most interesting content in your feeds. Enjoy!

Tools to improve your Reader experience

11/14/2006 06:00:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

As an engineer, one of the things that warms my heart is when users of my product become invested enough in it to want to extend it. I was very happy to see that Reader has begun to attract all sorts of hacks and add-ons that tweak the application to better suit the usage patterns of particular people. It's hard to make an interface that is everything to everyone, and add-ons like these are our best hope of making Reader the ideal feed aggregator for the largest number of people.

Here are a few add-ons that we've discovered recently:

Google Reader Notifier (Mac): This open-source application adds a menu-bar icon which keeps track of new items within your entire reading list or just for a particular tag (the latter is useful for people like me that are subscribed to a lot of feeds and want to know only when the important ones are updated). Troels Bay, the author, has been revving the application on a regular basis, and it's getting better and better.

Gordita: Reader has one-click starring and sharing of items, but you may want to do the same to pages outside of Reader. Gordita lets you create a bookmarklet that allows you to copy Reader items that interest you to del.icio.us, along with all the other items you've bookmarked over the Web.

Google Reader Optimized: This set of user styles maximizes the reading area. When you want to sit down and power through hundreds of items, you may find this compact, stripped-down interface preferable.

Controlling Google Reader with a Cell Phone : This add-on may be a bit out there, but in a nutshell it allows you to control Reader with your Bluetooth cellphone. Perhaps if used in combination with the full-screen style above, you can build your own Reader 10-foot user interface.

Reader Button for the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer: If you use the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, this custom button gives you one-click access to Reader and notifies you of new items via a changing icon.

Updated at 11am with the Toolbar button.

The post-interview interview

11/02/2006 05:52:00 PM

Posted by Nick Baum, Software Engineer

After I convinced Chris to star in our little intro video, he couldn't wait to turn the tables on me:

(click here to watch the post-interview interview)

Here are links to some recent interviews:

• Podtech.net interview with Robert Scoble
• Demo of Google Reader features
• Informal coffee-shop interview for The Blogging Times

Also, some of you may have had trouble accessing your Reader account this morning. There was some flakiness at one of our datacenters , but the problem was resolved within an hour. Sorry for the inconvenience -- you can rest assured that we're constantly working to improve our reliability and performance.