Reader and ARIA: A new way to read

3/12/2008 09:44:00 AM

We on the Reader team are delighted to have a guest post today from Google usability expert T.V. Raman, who has announced on the Google Blog that Reader now supports ARIA-powered screenreading. Our thanks go out to T.V. and to Charles Chen, fellow Googler and creator of FireVox, for their work in enabling more people than ever to benefit from Reader. Here's T.V.'s post on how to get started:

ARIA For Google Reader: In Praise Of Timely Information Access!

Here are instructions on how to set up fluent spoken feedback from screenreaders and self-voicing browsers when using Google Reader.

Spoken output support in Google Reader is implemented using Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA), an evolving standard for enhancing the accessibility of Web-2.0 applications. WAI-ARIA is supported at present by Firefox --- with future support forthcoming in other browsers. ARIA support in Google Reader has been tested in the following environments:

• Fire Vox The self-voicing extension to Firefox
• Firefox 3 with JFW 8.0 and Window-Eyes 5.5
• Portable Firefox 3 with both JFW 8.0 and Window-Eyes 5.5

Note that Firefox 3 is still in Beta and that ARIA support like the underlying standard is still in development. ARIA support in Google Reader is designed to help end-users experience the benefits of a powerful Web-2.0 application, while giving browser implementors and adaptive technology vendors a real-world application on which to test their implementations.

Activating ARIA Support In Google Reader

When you first open Google Reader using a screenreader, you will hear an invisible link labeled click here for ARIA enhanced Google Reader. Follow this link to activate ARIA support. You can bookmark the resulting page for future use.

Once on the ARIA-enabled Google Reader, press ? to hear a list of available keyboard commands. Power users note: most of these keyboard commands are available in the default version of Google Reader.

Please send all feedback to Google Group Accessible.

-Raman

One more step

3/05/2008 09:27:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

photo by groundzero (CC-licensed)

Not every Reader release is filled with exciting new features, but we'd like to think that every little improvement counts. While we've been working on some longer-term things, we've also had time to make some smaller changes to Reader, which we're releasing today:

More languages and countries: Reader is now available in Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland, Brazil, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.

Subscriber counts: If you were curious how many other subscribers a feed that you read has, you can now easily check: use the "show details" link in the top-right corner. Additionally, to see how indie/hip you are, you can use the "Most obscure" tab on the trends page to see the feeds that you subscribe to with the least number of subscribers. Just keep in mind what these numbers indicate.

Increased reading area: By shuffling some things around in the header area, we've managed to squeeze an additional 17 pixels of reading space for feed content. This may not seem like much, but every little bit matters when consuming hundreds of posts a day.

Bug fixes and performance improvements: We've made Reader faster to load when you have more than a thousand subscriptions. The settings page should feel perkier too. Finally, we've squashed some bugs -- most notably, bugs that prevented profiles from loading in certain cases. We also added improved keyboard navigation and fixed a problem refreshing search results. A lot of these tweaks and bug fixes are in response to user feedback that we get in our discussion group, so please keep it coming.

J-walking with Reader

2/07/2008 06:25:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Google Reader Keyboard (inspiration)

Google Reader is well-known for its keyboard shortcuts. When going through thousands of blog posts, news items, photos, etc. a day, it's important to do this as efficiently as possible. Many users find that using the keyboard is one way of accomplishing that goal.

The "j" key (which takes you to the next item) is perhaps the most well-known keyboard shortcut. However, there are many more keys to press, and I was curious to see just how much they were tapped in Google Reader. A quick analysis later, I came up with a simple top-10 list, and I thought it would be fun to share. The units here are "milli-Js", where 1,000 milli-Js are equivalent to all the presses "j" received.

Key	Description	Presses
j	next item	1,000.00 milli-Js
n	item scan down	324.18 milli-Js
k	previous item	139.49 milli-Js
m	mark as read/unread	43.91 milli-Js
t	tag item	37.48 milli-Js
p	item scan up	31.30 milli-Js
shift-n	next subscription	23.09 milli-Js
v	view original	17.98 milli-Js
o	expand/collapse item	16.81 milli-Js
s	star item	15.45 milli-Js

Of course, Reader has more than the 10 shortcuts listed above -- you can see them all in this list. Additionally, in some ways, the most important shortcut is not "j", but "?" (that is, shift-/). It shows you a cheat-sheet of all the other shortcuts.

Partly based on the data we gathered, and in our quest to make Reader as keyboard-accessible as possible, we've actually added a few more with the latest release. You can use "a" to open up the "Add subscription" form, "g" then "d" to go to the "Discover" page, and "g" then "f" to go your friends' shared items. If you have any other keyboard shortcuts you would like, feel free to mention them in our forums.

There's a feed for that?!

1/14/2008 02:57:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

As an engineer on Google Reader, it's always great to hear from users, especially when it's about how Reader has helped out. I was very happy when the team received this email from Gary Patino:

I was having a hard time finding the right job here in Houston. Days would go by without talking to a single recruiter. But then I started using Google Reader to subscribe to custom-made job search feeds for craigslist, and for oodle.com (which already aggregates feeds from thousands of other classified ad websites).

Soon I found myself flying all over the country interviewing for jobs. The employers always pay for the flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. My job hunt became like an exciting vacation! I've been to New York twice, Milwaukee, Austin, Los Angeles, and Miami. I just accepted an offer in Manhattan with a very competitive salary offer. Google Reader saved me a huge amount of time and effort with the job hunt. Thanks guys!

Gary's experience is a great reminder about the power of feeds. Feeds exist for all sort of information beyond blog and news sites and are a great way to receive timely updates. Here are some more examples of these atypical feed uses:

Finance: Both Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance let you get finance news updates for specific companies and stocks, just look for orange "Subscribe" or "RSS" icons in your browser. To receive stock quotes (only for some stocks), you can use NASDAQ's feeds.

Weather: You can get weather updates from The Weather Channel, WeatherBug, or NOAA's National Weather Service.

Classifieds: As Gary mentioned, both craigslist and Oodle.com offer feeds for all of their listings. Just look for the orange "RSS" link at the bottom of any results page -- when you subscribe to a search, for, say, apartments under $1500 in Manhattan, you'll get updates when there are new apartments matching that search. Similarly, in eBay you can find an RSS link at the bottom of any search page, and in Google Base near the top-right corner.

Package tracking: If you'd like to track packages that have been sent by UPS, FedEx, USPS or DHL/Airborne, you can use isnoop.net's universal package tracking or simpletracking.com.

Social networking: Facebook offers feeds for many of its features; you can see notifications, status updates, and your friends' posted items in Reader, as explained on this page. For those of you that are Twitter fans, you can get RSS feeds for many of its pages.

Shopping: Amazon lets you get feeds for the latest popular products as well as wish lists (look for the orange feed icon). Many other shopping web sites offer feeds, including Yahoo! Shopping, MSN Shopping, and NexTag.

Saved searches: Google Blog Search, Google News and most Yahoo! sites (among others) let you subscribe to search results as feeds. This way, if you want to monitor a topic, you don't have to keep running searches over and over again.

This list of sites is not comprehensive, feeds are finding their way into more and more places. Be on the lookout for the orange feed icon, so that you can save time and keep track of everything that interests you.

Managing your shared items

12/26/2007 06:52:00 PM

Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager

We've gotten a lot of helpful feedback about our new sharing feature. We'd hoped that making it easier to share with the people you chat with often would be useful and interesting, but we underestimated the number of users who were using the Share button to send stories to a limited number of people. We're looking at ways to make sharing more granular and flexible, but in the meantime there are several ways to share items without letting all of your Google Talk friends see them (you can also add or remove friends via Gmail or Google Talk).

You can still share any tag, or items you've starred, by clicking on Settings and selecting Tags. Each tag you share will get its own public page and feed URL, the same way shared items has a public page and feed; these tags will not be shared with anyone unless you send them the public address. Once you've shared a tag, simply click "Edit tags" at the bottom of any item to share it under that tag.

If you've already shared some items, you can click "Manage friends" in the upper-left box and then "move or clear your shared items"; from there you can select a tag to which you can transfer your list of shared items, or you can clear the list completely and start sharing anew. If you haven't logged into Reader in a while you'll be greeted by a pop-up window titled "Share with Friends", and you'll have the option to move or clear your shared items from there - your items will not be shared with your friends until you've clicked "Continue" from this window.

Thanks to all our users for helping to make Google Reader better, so please keep your feedback coming. From all of us on the Reader team, best wishes for a happy and healthy New Year!

Reader and Talk are Friends!

12/14/2007 05:54:00 PM

Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager

There once was a Reader named Chrix,
Who found himself in quite a fix:
He'd fun stuff to share
But no one was there,
Now Reader shows friends when Chrix clicks!

One of my favorite uses for Reader is to share interesting stuff with my friends. I click "Share" whenever I find an interesting item, be it hilarious or serious. This way, all my friends can subscribe to my shared items (and I to theirs), and we can easily see if a friend has found something interesting. This can be inconvenient, as I have to distribute my shared items link to my friends and vice-versa.

So, we've linked up Reader with Google Talk (also known as chat in Gmail) to make your shared items visible to your friends from Google Talk. Once you've logged into Reader and been notified of the change, these friends will be able to see your shared items in the Reader left-hand navigation area under "Friends' shared items". We've provided an option to clear your shared items in case you don't want your friends to see what you've shared in the past. We've also added a Settings page so you can choose which friends you see and invite friends who aren't yet sharing to try it out.

We're really excited about adding friends, but want to make clear that this is a work in progress. We know you might not see every feature you want just yet, so we hope you will play with it and send us your feedback. For now, this is available only in English on www.google.com/reader.

I like friends! I like Reader! I hope you do too.

Attack of the interns: recommendations and drag-and-drop

11/29/2007 06:39:00 PM

Posted by Steve Goldberg, Engineering Manager

One of the great things about Reader, and feed readers in general, is that they let you follow sites much more efficiently than you could just by visiting them directly. This means that once you get into the flow of it, you can subscribe and keep track of many more sites than before. The problem then becomes: what should you subscribe to? For example, there are millions of blogs, and while a few are well known, there are many more interesting (micro) niche blogs that would be great to subscribe to, if only you could find them.

To help with the discovery of interesting sites to subscribe to, we just released personalized recommendations in Reader. When you visit our discovery page, you'll see quite a few feeds that we think you may find interesting. "Interesting" here is determined by what other feeds you subscribe to. (To learn more about how our recommendations work, see our help article about them). Hopefully you'll find your recommendations interesting and helpful in getting your information-triggered dopamine squirt.

Recommendations make it even easier to subscribe to lots of feeds, so then the question becomes: how do you organize those feeds better? As luck would have it, one of the other features we're announcing today is drag-and-drop support for your subscriptions and folders. You can now easily move feeds between folders, as well as reorder things up and down within the list.

On the right, you can see Mihai's subscription list as he uses drag-and-drop to reorganize his froworkers folder. (Though you may not want to let your friends know how you're ranking then, lest it become a competition.) Of course, we can't take too much credit for drag-and-drop subscription management -- desktop aggregators have had it for a while, as have online feed readers like Bloglines and NewsGator.

What these two features have in common is that (ex-)interns played a significant role in delivering both of them. Nitin Shantharam (UC Irvine) helped create the user interface for recommendations, while Olga Stroilova (MIT) had a hand in the algorithms that generate them. Meanwhile, drag-and-drop was the brainchild of Brad Hawkes (UMass Amherst), who was our intern the summer of 2006, and returned to join the Reader team full-time earlier this year. As RIE (Reader Intern Emeritus), Brad paved the way for the great student help that we've had this year. Also to be mentioned is Jason Hall (Kent State), who was behind many interface improvements that have been live for a few months already. All told, our interns (and ex-interns) have done great work this year!

What do Reader and Heroes have in common?

11/19/2007 01:06:00 PM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer


Working at Google can be a pretty demanding job. But, as any member of the Google Reader team can attest, at least we're not subject to dangling from a harness that's strapped to one of our co-workers while lasers plot the path of massive cranes to swoop around us at high speeds while we're trying to do our job.

A few months ago, thanks to the graciousness of a group of artists, we saw that in person.

Google Reader is created and maintained by a small team of folks who all have a lot on their plates. Occasionally, we need a vacation. But planning a shared experience that's fun for everyone is tricky. Common points among people can be difficult to find -- unless you get lucky and work with a bunch of dorks who like superhero stories.

It turns out that nearly all of us got sucked into Heroes sometime during its first season, and a good friend of mine knows a director who was going to get to shoot an episode. So we asked if we could visit the set for our team's annual offsite. Despite this seeming like a longshot, a trip was arranged and we headed to the Heroes lot for a day of set gawking.

Be forewarned: nerd-level, in-depth pop-culture details to follow.



Our trip was amazing, and we owe a huge thanks to the director, Greg Yaitanes, and his crew, particularly Ben Grayson (whose attention and help made it a memorable day). Greg is a bit of a TV wunderkind -- he's directed many, many shows, including: Lost, Alias, Grey's Anatomy, House M.D., Prison Break, Nip/Tuck, CSI:NY, CSI:Miami, Women's Murder Club, Bones, Commander In Chief, Children of Dune, Las Vegas, V.I.P, and many more. Looking at his resume makes my eyes water, since he's only a few days older than me and he's done so much that it makes me wonder if I'm using my Saturdays really as effectively as I could.

Watching Greg work was enlightening. He let us sit behind him as he directed a few scenes of tonight's "Cautionary Tales" episode. This one was written by Joe Pokaski, who's been behind some of our more favorite recent moments such as Claire's toe-cutting experiment. The first scene we watched being filmed was an in-car scene featuring Sendhil Ramamurthy (Mohinder) and Jack Coleman (Mr. Bennet, "H.R.G") both of whom we got to meet. We can't post spoilers, of course. But they both turned out to be zombie vampire aliens! (Kidding. Or are we...?)




There were surprises for us on set. First, we were treated to personal time with the creative staff, who graciously explained their work and even took us on tours. We walked within and around many of the common sets used on Heroes, including Isaac's loft, the Suresh apartment, the Company, the Dawsons' beautiful and meticulously created New Orleans home, the police department were Matt works -- and we all jockeyed for picture time in front of the ocular on the Deveaux rooftop.

Mid-day, we were surprised by a visit by Tim Kring, who created Heroes and was kind enough to walk us through the editing rooms and even let us sit in on a "spotting" meeting. Spotting, in this case, meant visually evaluating the progress of special effects of a battle scene involving 17th-century Japanese warriors. We also saw early editions of Kristin Bell (Elle) ruthlessly wielding her power.

Tim was forthcoming, honest, direct and a delight to talk shop with. We ended our day by staying out of Ray Liotta's way (he was on the lot for something unrelated to Heroes) and guessing how the season would end. (Asking us would be futile, we don't know -- really!)

No one needed to be that nice to a group of wandering dorks. From craft services to the heads of production, everyone was incredible and it was a team offsite that's going to be tough to top next year.

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.