Official Google Reader Blog - News, Tips and Tricks from the Reader team

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

Friends in French 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

Add a tag while Sharing with NoteNotes 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.

Sort your feeds alphabetically

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.