Latest round of Reader improvements

5/19/2009 03:41:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

The Google Reader team has just finished releasing a new version of Reader with a bunch of small changes and tweaks that we thought you'd like to know about.

If you've added enough friends in Reader that you're feeling overwhelmed, we're here to help. We've added a new set of tabs to the trends page called "Friends trends." This way you can see which of your friends share the most, and whose shared items you actually get around to reading.

In other social-related news, we're continuing to iterate on our comments feature. With this release, comments are now available to our non-English users. Additionally, item sources are now visible in the comment view and it's easier to mark items as read there.

Another area that we've focused on improving is the new user experience; we know that a fully armed and operational Reader account can help users go through a large amount of information very quickly, but getting to that point can be daunting. We've recently released a revamped new user page that tries to help with that. In addition to a welcome video and a tutorial, it also tries to help you get started by pointing out the kinds of feeds that you can subscribe to. Our most recent addition to this is the ability to import feeds from iGoogle. This way if you're trying out Reader and already have a heavily customized iGoogle account, your feeds are just a click away.

We've also made improvements to our mobile interface. You can now post notes if an interesting thought occurs to you while waiting in line. For those of you with Android phones, we've also fixed a particularly annoying bug that led to items not being marked as read correctly.

A lot of these changes were made in response to user feedback. Whether it's via Twitter, blogs or our discussion group, please keep it coming.

Meeting friends of friends

5/04/2009 01:59:00 PM

Posted by Nick Santaniello, Consumer Operations

About two months ago we enabled commenting on your friends' shared items. Today, we're happy to introduce some changes to how commenting works, including the ability to start sharing with any of the people who comment on your friends' shared items.

Have you ever read a comment on a friend's shared item and wondered who that person was? In the past, there hasn't been a way to interact with these people besides reading their comments on your friends' shared items. Not anymore!

By hovering over the name of an unfamiliar commenter you can see their profile picture and the links they've added to their Google Profile. Furthermore, you can click the "Start sharing" link to start sharing your shared items with that person!

This is a great way to add new people to your friends list. When that person next logs in, they'll see an option to view your shared items as well as the option to start sharing with you. If they reciprocate, you'll have a new friend in your Reader.

We've also made comments more visible and more flexible from within Reader. Now, you'll be able to see comments on shared items while viewing All items. You'll also be notified when new comments are made by the small speech bubble icon in your left sidebar, even when your Friends' shared items module is collapsed. While making comments, your options for formatting have been increased. Try using asterisks or underscores to spice up your comments with bold and italic text.

Note: You can stop sharing your items with someone at any time by visiting the Sharing settings link in your left sidebar. Also, if someone chooses to share with you, your shared items are not visible to that person unless you consent. Finally, the "start sharing" link in profile cards will also only appear to those users sharing with friends, and not those sharing only with chat buddies.

Google Reader is your new watercooler

3/11/2009 03:21:00 PM

Posted by Jenna Bilotta, User Experience Designer

One of the things that we love best about Reader is the ability to easily share interesting items with your friends. In fact, we like it so much that we've been adding bunches of new sharing features over the last year including choosing friends to share with, sharing with note and the sharing bookmarklet. But we quickly realized that one of the most important pieces of the sharing cycle was missing: the ability to have conversations with friends about all those shared items.

With our new conversation feature, you can have private discussions on shared items with your friends. Now, instead of obsessively asking everyone in your office if they have seen that awesome lego cake article you shared last night, they can tell you how awesome you are, right within Google Reader!

What's new with this feature:

• You can comment on any items that you share or that have been shared by your friends.
  
• In order to keep track of conversations, you can check out the new "Comment view" which is optimized for tracking conversations and commenting. Comment view is a little different from your normal reading mode because it sorts the list of items by most recent comment. When there are new comments, the "Comment view" link will appear as bold. You can even read the full text of the items in this view by clicking the "Expand this item" (which will mark it as read).
  
• If you see a comment icon on top of a friend's profile picture in list or expanded view, it means there are comments on that item (this helps you decide what to read first.)
• When more than one of your friends share the same item, you'll see a separate conversation under each person who shared it, together in the same view.
• And don't forget, you can always read and add comments on your iPhone.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Comments can only be seen by friends of the person who originally shared the item.
• Comments are not yet available in the "All items" view.
• We have much more planned for this feature, but we would love to hear what you think, too.
• Currently, you cannot comment on items in a shared items subscription or on a shared tag; comments can only be made on items shared by friends.
• This release is English-only for now.

We are super excited to bring you this feature, and have plans to keep improving it in the near future. So, find some friends that use Reader, find some cool stuff to share, and join the conversation. Happy commenting!

SXSW 2009 Party: Reader, Blogger, and You

3/07/2009 01:31:00 PM

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

It's about that time of year again! If you're heading down to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest, we hope you can join us and our friends from Blogger for a little party. Come, drink, and meet the fine folks behind Google Reader. We may even have a few things for early arrivals...

• Where: Six Lounge - 117 W 4th St @ Colorado (map)
• When: Sunday, March 15th from 10pm - 1am

Bring an SXSW Interactive Badge, or find one of us or the Blogger team at the conference for an invitation. We'll be donning some schwag, so keep an eye out.

Hope to see you there, and don't forget to follow googlereader on Twitter for any updates!

What we did on our winter break

1/29/2009 08:37:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

After our big launch of the new look and feel, the Reader team took a breather and worked on tying up loose ends (don't worry, we also took some time off). We've just pushed a new release that includes the following set of fixes and tweaks:

• Improvements to our rich mobile interface for iPhone, Android and other browsers, including a more compact page header, visual alignment tweaks and a faster loading time.
• Links on the home page giving you easy access to your recently read and kept unread items.
• Fixes for some "stuck" unread count issues.
• Better handling of feeds and items with malformed URLs.
• Less flickering when using the "Share with note" bookmark.
• Fixing of errors when deleting lots of tags and folders.
• Removal of extra image and backend requests, resulting in slightly faster loading times.

One other recent change is that we're now on Twitter. We've been fans of Twitter Search as a way of gathering feedback, but now we have a way of talking back. Feel free to send an @googlereader tweet to get our attention, and follow us for updates and quips.

Finally, we were honored to be nominated for a Bloggie. We encourage you to take a look at all the nominees in all the categories, it's a collection of some really great, subscribe-worthy, blogs

Google Reader for Beginners

1/08/2009 04:30:00 PM

Posted by Nick Santaniello, Consumer Operations

Have you ever had a friend or family member who you know would love using Google Reader? Have you ever had trouble explaining to that same friend or family member just how using Reader could make their lives easier (and more fun)? We sure have, so if you're anything like us then we have some useful tools in store for you.

The Google Reader Team is proud to introduce several new help resources designed specifically at introducing beginners to using Reader: Google Reader Help Videos and the Google Reader Getting Started Guide, both accessible directly from our Help Center.

Feel free to let us know what you think by commenting on the videos or by leaving feedback in our Help Forum. Although the videos are aimed at beginners, we're hoping to eventually cover even more advanced and lesser-known features in the same visual and step-by-step manner.

Now get watching, Readers! And don't forget to send the link along to your favorite beginner, newbie, or visual learner!

Happy Holidays from the Reader Team

12/18/2008 11:55:00 AM

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

As 2008 draws to a close, we'd like to leave you with a little gift. And since we know the one thing everyone wants is more stuff to read (don't forget you can hide unread counts!), we've got just the thing.

You may have noticed that we added a little "What's hot" section our blog's sidebar that shows some algorithmically generated stuff that is interesting across the web. Who are we kidding... you're probably reading this blog in Reader, so this is news to you. If you're interested in Google's Top 10 Hidden Treasures, meat-scented body spray, or being a little more environmentally friendly, what are you waiting for? Go check it out (view in Reader)! We've also added it to our Staff Picks bundle, so if you haven't yet taken a look at some of the other awesome blogs there, go ahead and treat yourself.

We hope you enjoy it, and hope you have a happy holidays! See you all in 2009.

Special thanks goes out to Derek on the Recommendations team for making this awesome feed possible!

Updated 12/19/2008: Clarified that "What's Hot" lives in the Reader Blog's sidebar, not Reader itself.

Square is the new round.

12/04/2008 11:39:00 AM

Posted by Jenna Bilotta, User Experience Designer

On the Reader team, we know that the old adage "change is good" isn't always true. Sometimes, change is just change. In this case, we hope that these decisions both improve your Reader experience today, and pave the way for additional improvements down the line. So...what's changing, you ask?

Updated look and feel

Google is all about speed, both under the hood as well as in the user experience. So, in order to make Reader act and feel more speedy and responsive, we've removed some visual clutter, simplified some features and given everything a bit more breathing room. Out with the old rounded corners, drop shadows and heavily saturated colors -- in with a softer palette, faster components and a fresh new look.

(old)

(new)

Collapsible navigation

Each section of the navigation pane now has its own options menu and minimize/maximize controls. You can collapse each major section of navigation down to one line and focus on only the things you choose to use.

Friends get promoted

Shared items have grown up and gotten their own section in the navigation pane. You can collapse this entire section and use the title to see everything your friends have shared, or leave it open to track friends with shared items. (Don't forget that you can add new friends in "Sharing settings".)

Hide unread counts

We've heard you loud and clear. For some of you (and some of us on the Reader team), unread counts are a source of anxiety and can feel more like a to-do list than the random awesomeness of the Internet. So to help you sleep better at night, we've added the ability to turn off unread counts for each section of navigation independently. Subscriptions with unread items will still appear as bold, and you can see the number of unread items if you hold your mouse over the subscription name. To really set yourself free, try turning them off for all sections. (Ahhhhhh, now doesn't that feel better?)

More feed bundles!

Feed bundles are small sets of feeds related to a topic that you can subscribe to all at once. Historically, these were done "by hand" by the Reader team, but this just wasn't working out. So we've written a program to make "bundles" for us – no more manual editing of bundles, and a much richer and interesting set of subscriptions for you to choose from. We've added a bunch of new topic-based bundles for easier feed discovery. Just find the "Browse for stuff" link in the main navigation pane and look for the "Browse all bundles" link on the bundles tab. Now, you can learn more than you ever wanted to about NASCAR, yoga or knitting.

Looking for something that's moved?

• The "Refresh" button from the subscription list is now in the Subscriptions options menu or triggered by simply clicking on the word "Subscriptions"
• The "Show all - updated" controls are now in the Subscriptions options menu.
• The "Add subscription" button has moved to the top of the navigation pane.

As always, we love to get feedback in our discussion group, and we look for it in a number of other sources -- please keep it coming!

Is Your Web Truly World-Wide?

11/10/2008 02:45:00 PM

The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: automatic translation in Reader! Post by 20% volunteer and glottology expert, Brett Bavar.

Believe it or not, the web truly is world-wide. That means there is a lot of interesting content out there in languages other than your own. You might have missed out on this content in the past, but now, with automatic translation in Reader, you don't have to miss a thing!

Next time you find an interesting feed in another language, just subscribe to it as normal in Reader. When you view the feed in Reader, check off "Translate into my language" in the feed settings, and (voila!) the feed will be immediately translated for you. Also, this setting will be saved so you can always view this feed in your own language.

Many thanks go out to the awesome engineers on the Google Translate team, who have provided the technology to make this possible. As they continue to make their translation systems better, you will get to reap the benefits automatically.

Have fun discovering all the great content out there on the truly world-wide web!

Better Cooking Through Reader-ing

11/06/2008 07:41:00 AM

We thought it would be fun to have some guest bloggers write about how they use Reader. Ann Verbin is a friend of the Reader team, and a pretty avid user. In this post, she writes about how Reader helps her find and organize recipes.

I started using Google Reader around the same time that I started cooking more – in fact, it was probably Reader that inspired me to really get into cooking. Shortly after Reader launched, one of my friends recommended a cooking blog, Chocolate & Zucchini, and I subscribed to it. I really liked reading about new recipes on the blog on a regular basis, and I would star the ones I particularly liked so that I could find them later. Soon, I was subscribed to many more cooking blogs, and was starring more and more favorite recipes daily. My starred items list became very long, and it was becoming hard to find things that I remembered I liked (this was before Reader had search).

This is when I discovered item-level tagging. Instead of just starring each recipe I liked, I would also add a tag (or several tags) to it. My tags were generally divided into meal ideas (e.g. "dessert", "breakfast", "main-course") and ingredient specifics (e.g. "eggs", "vegetables", "meat", "pasta"). This way, if we were having people over and one of the guests was vegetarian, I would browse through my pasta and vegetables tags for ideas on what to make. Even after Reader added search, I continued to star and tag my favorite items. Search is very useful when you know what you are looking for, but less appropriate when you are just considering what to make for dinner and don't have anything too specific in mind.

The last tags that I have created for my item-level tagging are "cooked" and "cooked-good". This way I can keep track of all the recipes that I have actually tried out, and not just read about. And any time I am feeling in the mood for something (somewhat) familiar, I can browse through my "cooked-good" tag.

What do Google Reader engineers read?

10/29/2008 09:29:00 PM

Posted by Mike Knapp, Software Engineer

We are all passionate feed readers on the Google Reader team. For us, working on Reader is a dream job. Why? Because we have the perfect excuse when we're caught browsing feeds at work!

For a bit of fun, and to show you what we like reading, we've put together a bundle of our favorite feeds. After much deliberation, we've narrowed down our "Staff Picks" to the following:

• Cute Overload (view in Reader)
• Design Milk (view in Reader)
• Dinosaur Comics (view in Reader)
• Jake And Amir Dot Com (view in Reader)
• Just Bento (view in Reader)
• La Tartine Gourmande (view in Reader)
• MAKE Magazine (view in Reader)
• POPSUGAR (view in Reader)
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun (view in Reader)
• The Big Picture (view in Reader)
• The Kitchn (view in Reader)
• ThinkGeek (view in Reader)
• WebUrbanist (view in Reader)

Not only do these feeds capture the personalities on our team, they are mainly all "full text" feeds (i.e. containing the original pictures, videos and text).

If you want to subscribe to all of these feeds at once, head over to our discover page and subscribe to the "Staff Picks" bundle (English only).

If you haven't used Reader before, maybe these feeds might give you some ideas for websites you'd like to start tracking.

We hope you enjoy these feeds as much as we do!

We like it graphed

10/28/2008 02:50:00 PM

Posted by Dolapo Falola, Software Engineer

When we launched the Trends page last year, we wanted to visualize how we consumed data in Google Reader. One of the more interesting sections of the Trends page is the chart that shows items read by time. Spikes in the chart are a cool way of noticing patterns and possibly realizing that the reason we're less productive on Fridays is because of Reader. Some of us on the Reader team are obsessed with keeping our unread counts low so we wondered if we were being driven by the posting schedule of our subscriptions. We thought the chart might be more interesting if we showed when posts were coming into Reader, so we are now graphing published statistics on the same chart. For example, in my set of subscriptions, even though I'm reading the majority of items in the evening, new posts seem to arrive in the middle of the day.

We also wanted to expose more fine-grained data. While it's useful to know what your overall reading trends are, we thought it might be interesting to also display this data on a subscription by subscription level. If you've ever been curious about when your favorite subscriptions were publishing new posts or when you were reading them, click the "show details" link in the upper right corner of the viewer. It's a good way to peak into your personal habits as well as the posting schedule of your favorite blogs. While you're in there, check out the other details - we also display the last crawl time and any errors encountered during that crawl.

Reading The Guardian, full-text style

10/24/2008 12:38:00 PM

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

We've always used Reader to keep up to date on news and current events and today it just got a little easier: The Guardian just moved all of their RSS feeds from partial to full-text. They are the first major newspaper in the world to do so, and this is, well, great news.

Over on their blog, they talk about making sure people can "get the guardian.co.uk experience in whatever context is most useful to them," and now whether you're interested in just the top stories (subscribe in Reader) or music album reviews (subscribe) or just articles on politics by Marina Hyde (subscribe), you can read them in their full-text form, here on Reader.

This is a huge first step in making more content available in more places, and we applaud the Guardian for taking it.

iGoogle launches Reader integration

10/16/2008 10:08:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

It's a little known fact that Reader and iGoogle are siblings. They share some parents (hi Steve!). They've both been growing up fast since their respective launches in mid-2005. They even sat next to each other for a while.

When we heard about the iGoogle team's plans to have a canvas view (allowing for much richer content), we thought it would be great to help a brother (or is it sister?) out. We therefore took on the task of powering iGoogle's new canvas view for feeds. Now you can get the same powerful Reader interface for any feed in iGoogle, complete with keyboard shortcuts, expanded and list views, infinite scrolling and embedded videos.

For those of you who are Reader users already, the Reader gadget has also been updated to take advantage of the canvas view: you can now share, email and browse through your folders and subscriptions, all within iGoogle.

You can see both the new feed view and the updated Reader gadget in action on the updated iGoogle.

One word to describe Google Reader...

10/13/2008 12:15:00 PM

Posted by Nick Santaniello, Consumer Operations

Over the past two weeks, some of you may have noticed (and might have even clicked on) a link to a satisfaction survey while using Google Reader. We're always interested in learning more about how you use Google Reader and what features you'd like to see next. We'll certainly be sharing what features and fixes emerged from your input in the coming weeks.

We asked all of you to describe Reader in one word and, well, here's what you said:

(Responses as of October 6th, 2008) | Word cloud created at http://wordle.net

Try clicking the image to see a zoomable version that allows you to get close and see some of the less frequent, yet often equally insightful/amusing, words you used to describe Reader (you can also turn your own images into zoomable maps here).

We were really happy to hear that the great majority of respondents thought very highly of Google Reader, but we also acknowledge that there's a lot of work to be done, as some of you described Reader as:

• Meh
• cpumemoryhog
• adequate
• clunky

Finally, we didn't know quite what to make of some of your descriptions, but enjoyed them thoroughly nonetheless:

• Wunderbar
• Cromulent
• creamy-goodness
• Pineapple

Thanks again for your helpful (and highly amusing) feedback!

Two New Power Readers, and Canada

9/25/2008 07:50:00 AM

Post by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Today we added two more journalist contributors to the Power Readers in Politics project: Marc Ambinder (Associate Editor of The Atlantic) and Jerry Seib (Executive Washington Editor of The Wall Street Journal). There are now 10 journalists sharing and commenting on political news with Google Reader, who in total have shared over 300 news items since we launched. By visiting the Power Readers site and clicking on your favorite contributor, you can add any participant's shared news feed to Google Reader so you won't miss newly shared items.

As a quick refresher, we launched Power Readers in Politics in August so that people could see the news sites read by Barack Obama and John McCain, and discover political news articles being shared in Google Reader by both the presidential campaigns and leading political pundits.

If you are interested in Canadian politics, we launched Power Readers Canada yesterday that features shared news from the major party leaders and top Canadian journalists.

Friends Everywhere, and other Friendly Features

9/23/2008 02:25:00 PM

Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager

It's Tuesday here, so the Reader team is happy to announce a bunch of new features: friends worldwide, tagging with note, alphabetical ordering, and even last-crawl-date. Fun!

Friends Everywhere

Now that our new and improved sharing features are available in the US, we have made sharing with friends available to Reader users in all supported languages. We are dedicating this to our teammate Steve Goldberg, who claims he can speak almost every language in which Reader is available.

Tagging while Sharing and Noting

Notes are great, but sometimes a note just isn't enough. Notes occasionally need more color, more flavor, more organization. So, you can now add a tag while adding a note. This is especially useful if you use lots of tags to organize your posts, or if you have multiple public shared tags. We'd like to dedicate this to our newest teammate, Mike Knapp, who enjoys being user-facing.

Sort your Subscriptions

We've had countless hours of fun dragging n' dropping our feeds to keep them organized, but that can get annoying. So, in a move to delight lexicographers everywhere, you can now choose between alphabetical ordering or drag n' drop ordering for your subscription list, via an "Options" menu at the bottom-left of Reader's interface. This feature is dedicated to Ben Darnell, whose name is near the start of the alphabet.

And, as a bonus, we've exposed the date we last crawled a feed in the "details" area, and made some iPhone speed improvements and bug fixes. Have a happy Tuesday, and, as always, let us know what you think of our new features.

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.