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Earlier this week we pushed out a new release of Reader. Most of the changes are under the hood and should make for a faster, smoother experience. However, there were a few user interface tweaks too. My favorite is support for the space keyboard shortcut. In all browsers, pressing the space key moves down in the current page. Reader's addition to that is to advance to the next item if you're at the end of the current one. This means that you can read your entire reading list with just one finger press! I'm sure there is some sort of Pavlov's dog joke to be made here, but we can't take too much credit for the one-click advance, since it's been present in email clients for ages.

Here's a more complete list of other changes we've made:

• Progress messages for most operations.
• Usability tweaks when subscribing to feeds.
• Stopped using "click here" for link text (thanks for reminding us Philipp).
• Fixed OPML import issues for Newsgator users.
• Fixed issues with item links in some Planet and Odeo feeds.
• Fixed Firefox issue that made it eat up the entire CPU when loading items.

We plan on keeping the features and improvements going strong. Feedback = better Reader. Thanks for your help.

It turns out some folks, like Reader-fan Moebius, are enjoying Reader in new ways:

I don't like to use my laptop on my lap, because of heat and other reasons, and I don't like to be pushing the 'J' key very often, so I downloaded "JoyToKey" to use my gamepad for browsing Google Reader. With JoyToKey I mapped "J" to down and "K" to up, "V" to right, and "Ctrl-W" to left. The other joystick was mapped to other normal browser commands. So, I can read Google News very comfortably sitted on my sofa.

Watch out for gamepad thumb and that other RSS.

Mom always taught us to share and now we know why, because it's fun. As of tonight, Google Reader has the ability to share what you like to read with your friends. You can send a link to your starred items in Reader, or you can put a clip on your blog with recent items from your reading list (as shown below).

Give this a little test drive if you like, preview 'My starred items' in Google Reader. If you like my list you can subscribe to it from the preview screen.

Additionally, if you use the tagging labeling feature of Reader, you can label items and share them. For instance, I mark all of the blogs I read from my hipster friends in Reader 'hipsters' (if my hipster friends aren't your speed try my tech list). Even if your friends use a feed reader other than Google Reader, we won't be upset. You can direct them to a feed of any of your shared labels.

You control the privacy or shared nature of your lists. To begin sharing your reading lists or add a clip to your blog, go to reader.google.com and open the Share tab. Check the 'shared' check box to opt-in to sharing your starred items or selected labels. Enjoy!

Update on 3/23 by Mihai: I've posted some more techy information about sharing on my blog.