Author Archive

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.

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.

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!

The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: a Reader Google Desktop gadget! Post by 20% volunteer and Google Desktop expert, James Yum.

Wherever there are gadgets, RSS feed readers are never lacking, and Google Desktop gadgets are no exception. Until now, there hasn't been a good way to combine all your feeds into a single gadget. With the new Google Reader gadget, you can now track your feeds and Google Reader subscriptions directly from your desktop. The Google Reader gadget is designed to be familiar for existing Reader users, yet compact like our other Desktop gadgets.

To get started, download the gadget (you might need to install Google Desktop first) and sign-in to your Google account. If you select a subscription, your gadget will update automatically with new posts. Clicking an item opens a larger view where you can see the item preview and perform familiar actions such as star, share, and email. Due to a technical limitation of Google Desktop gadgets, full HTML feeds won't render fully, but clicking on an item title will take you to the original website in your browser.

The Google Reader gadget runs with the latest Linux and Windows releases of Google Desktop gadgets and is open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. We hope this gadget is a fun and useful way to access your Google Reader subscriptions. Please give it a try and tell us what you think.

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

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

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

Since our last big launch, we've been thinking about ways to help our users better share, discover, and consume content in Reader. Today, I'm happy to announce several new features that we hope will further improve the way you use Reader.

Send to...
We've made it easier to share posts you like to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, and more, with our new "Send to" feature. (Incidentally, Blogger is celebrating its tenth birthday this month, and we're hoping our friends there will like this little birthday present.)
Just head over to the settings page, and enable the services you want to use. If your favorite service isn't listed (and you're feeling extra geeky), you can create your own "Send to" link with a URL template.

To share an item on one of your sites, simply click the "Send to" button and choose your service. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, "shift-t" will do the same.

Feeds from people you follow
When we added following, we tried to make it easier to find and follow people who share similar interests. Now we've gone even further, and made it possible for you to subscribe directly to the blogs, photos, or Twitter updates that anyone you're following has included on their Google profile.

To quickly subscribe to these sites, click the "From people you follow" tab on the "Browse for stuff" page.

More control for mark all as read
We know people can be overwhelmed by too many unread items, and sometimes only want to see recent posts. The "Mark all as read" button now has a menu that lets you choose to only mark items as read if they're older than your specified time frame. A tip of the hat to Nick Bradbury who pioneered this "panic button" feature.

Finally, a few small tweaks in this release:

• When you expand an item in comment view, you now get the full set of actions, enabling you to share, like, and star items without leaving comment view.
• We added a "Feeds" start-page option for the iPhone/Android/Pre mobile interface, so you can see a list of your subscriptions when you sign in.
• There is now an option to show notes when embedding your shared items on other pages as clips.

As always, if you have feedback, please head over to our help group, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.

At Google we're always looking for ways to take advantage of work being done in other parts of the organization. So when a team approached us with a way to follow changes from websites without feeds, we jumped at the opportunity. Post by Liza Ma, Product Manager.

Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we're rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed.

These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org's latest products, just type "http://www.google.org/products.html" into Reader's "Add a subscription" field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

Here are some more example feeds for sites without feeds that you could follow:

• Macy's - special offers [view in Reader]
• NYU Computer Science homepage [view in Reader]
• Zillow.com homepage [view in Reader]

We provide short snippets of page changes to help you quickly decide if the page is worth revisiting and we're working on improving the quality of these snippets. If you don't want Google to crawl or create feeds for a specific site, site owners can opt-out.

If you have a feed-less page you've been dying to follow, sign in to Google Reader and try it out for yourself. As always, if you have any feedback, please visit our official help forums or our Twitter account.

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Wow. Who knew your hunger for points and badges was so insatiable? While ReaderAdvantage™ was a joke, we actually ordered and are distributing Reader badges as part of the joke. Unfortunately, so many people ordered them that we ran through our stockpile a mere 27 minutes after we announced the program. Which got us to thinking... just how much do our users read?

A few stats about the badge submissions:

• 13% of people who requested a badge ended up way over our “Totally Sweet” threshold of 314,159 items read...
• 25% of you were Platinum (133,700 read items or more).
• Even more amazing, four people had read over one million lifetime items.
• One person had read more than two million items. (Holy cow.)

For comparison, the average Reader user reads about 105 items a day, which isn’t bad unless you want to get to the Totally Sweet level of over 314,159 lifetime read items - at that rate it’s going to take you over 8 years to get there. And if you’re aiming to join the (recently founded) One Million Club, we’re talking over 26 years. So, uh, time to start reading?

While we were at it, we took a look at what users are starring, sharing, and liking the most. While many of the most-starred items are reference posts, collections of tips, or tutorials from our friends over at Lifehacker, the most starred item lately is actually this hilarious video. That same video also shows up near the top of the latest and most liked or shared items, along with a collection of interesting images, designs, and bizarrely useless machines. It’s clear that the crowd is onto something here, so if you’re not getting these items in your current feeds, maybe it’s time to check out Reader Play or the Recommended items section in Reader.

P.S. We’re shipping the badges soon. Really.

Posted by Wiktor Gworek, 20% task force (Krakow, Poland)

Last year we announced that we wanted to hear your wish list for features in Google Reader, and one of most highly requested features was the ability to rename folders and tags. Today we are rolling out this feature with a little bit of Polish help from Krakow.

You can rename folders and tags on the settings page:

And you can also edit these names right from the contextual menu in your subscription list.

Also, as we announced last week, today we’ve disabled offline access through Gears, and phased out support for older browsers.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please head over to our help forums, or send us a message on Twitter.

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

As of September 30th, we’ll be turning off track changes in Reader. While this isn’t a widely used feature, we wanted to let you know in advance so you can set up a suitable alternative (such as http://page2rss.com). Your previous updates will not go away, but you will stop receiving new updates from any custom feeds you have set up.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes -- and as always, please feel free to visit our help forum if you have any questions.

Update: You can use the Page2RSS transition tool to convert your feeds here: http://grtransition.page2rss.com/