Print this articleThe 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!
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. If you use Reader in an interesting way and would like to share, get in touch. -- Mihai
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
Mobile web browsers have come a long way since we first introduced an XHTML version of Reader back in 2006. For example, iPhone and iPod Touch owners know how powerful having a full-featured browser is. We on the Reader team are heavy mobile Safari users. Sometimes we use it to kill time, other times for answering important questions that come up during brunch: What is Tyrol's first name? How is maple butter made? How do you sweeten rhubarb for sangria? What is John Gruber saying now? For questions like the last one, we of course use Reader to keep up with our subscriptions.
To make our (and your) Reader iPhone experience better, we wanted to really take advantage of the iPhone's capabilities. Today we're releasing a new beta version of Reader designed for the iPhone and other mobile phones with advanced browsers. You can use it by visiting http://www.google.com/reader/i/ on your phone.
This new version is designed to offer many of the same features as the desktop, while making it quick and easy to act on items. If you've used list view, then it should be familiar to you. Scan the titles for an item that interests you, tap and it expands in place. Starring, sharing, and keeping unread are done in place, so you never have to leave the list view or refresh the page. We think it's a very fast way to power through your reading list.
Since it's still in beta, we're not going to automatically send you to it, so bookmark the site so that you don't forget the address (http://www.google.com/reader/i/). We love getting feedback from users, so let us know what you think in our discussion group or the other channels.
T.V. Raman and Charles Chen, who have helped out with accessibility in Reader in the past, have not rested on their laurels and have another feature to announce:
I've long maintained that CSS is one of the most well-kept (and consequently under-exploited) accessibility secrets of the Web. Thinking back to the time that CSS1 became a W3C Recommendation, those of us who cared deeply about accessibility took great care to ensure that the end-user had a lot of control with respect to how content was displayed -- yet, end-user tools that allow users to leverage this capability have been rare.
As we were experimenting with Google Reader using AxsJAX, one of the enhancements we prototyped was the addition of a simple CSS-based lens that allows the user to selectively magnify the current article. Notice that this is subtly different from using a generic screen magnifier -- in that later case, you end up magnifying the entire screen. Google Reader can be smarter; since it knows which article you are currently reading, it can selectively magnify just that article upon request. This results in much better use of screen real-estate -- something that is an even scarcer resource when you're a low-vision user.
After prototyping this via the AxsJAX framework, we decided that this feature made sense for exposing to all our users -- we have now integrated this functionality into the main Reader interface. So with this lens in hand (your pocket) you can continue to hit j and k to move through articles, and when you find the print too small to read you can press = or - to enlarge or shrink the font of the article you're reading. The C in CSS stands for Cascading -- and in this case, you the end-user get to have the final say in how you consume your content by cascading your request for a larger font on top of the presentation chosen by the content publisher.
-Raman
Have you ever wanted to share something that you were reading, but you didn't want to go through the hassle of subscribing to a whole feed for a single interesting article? And what about sharing content from sites with no feeds? There you are, reading along, and you think to yourself, "If only everything on the web had a 'Share' button like in Google Reader!"
As it turns out, there's all sorts of information "out there" just waiting to be streamed, shared and otherwise consumed by you and your friends. Now you can finally show all of your Reader friends that awesome talking cat video you found, your favorite grilled trout recipe, or reviews of the best brunch place in your neighborhood -- all without a subscription.
Here are a few new ways you can add and share interesting things in Reader:
Share items with a note - If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader, but think your friends might not "get" why you are sharing it. Use the "Share with note" button on the item toolbar to create a copy of that item with your own note attached to it. Now your friends won't have to wonder if the B-movie about an evil floor lamp you shared was intended to be funny, sarcastic, ironic or the real motivation behind your next movie night.
Add a note - Do you ever get the urge to just share a thought with your friends without attaching it to any particular item? Now, you can let your friends know whatever pops into your head (for better or for worse) by typing anything into the text box at the top of the Notes page.
We have also added a few other small features to make your sharing even more awesome! Add a little personality to your public shared items page by choosing from three new styles from your shared items page.
Finally, we've changed the list view to highlight when an item is being shared by a friend, as opposed to through your normal subscriptions.
I hope you like these new sharing features as much as I do, because I'm always on the lookout for even more ways to share cool things with my friends! As always, much of our feature development is in response to feedback that we get in our discussion group, and a number of other sources -- so please keep it coming!
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
There once was a Reader named Chrix,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.
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!
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.
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, as well as your Web History data, all taken into account in an automated, anonymized fashion. (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!
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.
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.
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.
