November 10th, 2008

Google makes the blogosphere more universal

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 3:53 pm

Categories: Google Reader, Google Translate

Tags: Google Inc., Blogosphere, Language, Blogging, Internet, Garett Rogers

I have come across blogs in the past that look very interesting, but are completely unreadable. Poor writing? Not at all, just in another language. On occasion, I have subscribed to these interesting feeds, and when a new article is published, I translate it into English using Google Translate.

Yes, it was a huge pain, but I would often get enough useful information out of it to justify it. Google has just released a new feature that is going to save me a lot of time, and makes the blogosphere a lot more universal. When you subscribe to a feed in Google Reader that is written in another language, you can now simply select the option “Translate into my language”, and you will magically be able to read that blog just as you would any other.

August 18th, 2008

Want to know what key political players are reading?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 12:06 pm

Categories: Google Reader

Tags: Google Inc., News, Blogging, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Garett Rogers

This is an interesting idea — Google’s now sharing with the world what is catching attention from presidential candidates and political commentators. Political news isn’t hard to find online — it’s basically everywhere. Popular news featured on Google News is often political in nature, and there is certainly no shortage of political bloggers out there.

But, have you ever wondered what politicians and journalists themselves are reading? Do they find the same things interesting that you do? To help you answer that question, Google has launched a website called “Power Readers” that aggregates articles shared by these people through Google Reader.

So right now, who are considered “Power Readers”? Well, on the Official Google Blog, they have published the current list:

• Obama and McCain campaigns
• Mike Allen, POLITICO
• Chuck DeFeo, Townhall
• John Dickerson, Slate
• Mark Halperin, TIME
• Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
• Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
• Jon Meacham, Newsweek
• Patrick Ruffini, The Next Right

A similar type of system be applied to lots of different types of news though — I think Google should definitely consider doing the same thing for Tech news (or perhaps even more detailed to something like “Google” or “Apple” news for example). What do you think?

May 12th, 2008

Google releases Reader BETA for iPhone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:08 pm

Categories: Google Reader

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Google Reader, Blog, Interface, Blogging, Internet, Garett Rogers

Google Reader is one of the most active projects at Google as far as adding new features and creating interfaces that work well on other devices. They even have Google Reader designed specifically for the Wii. Now they have released a brand new interface for the iPhone for us to play with.

Reader already has a pretty good interface for the iPhone — actually, I’d say the old one is on par with the new one, if not better in some ways. I understand that the new one is a beta, and that’s why I’m not going to rag on it too hard here. The only think I really don’t like is when you click “Feeds”, then select a tag, you are taken to a list of blogs associated with that tag rather than a list of articles to read. I’m not sure if I’m weird, but I like to read all the aggregated articles for a certain tag — not on an individual blog basis.

Overall though, it’s great to see that Google isn’t afraid to work on products that are already great. To get to the new interface in your iPhone or iPod Touch, go to http://www.google.com/reader/i/. What do you think? Do you like the new interface?

May 6th, 2008

Google Reader lets users do micro-blogging

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:55 am

Categories: Google Reader

Tags: Google Inc., Google Reader, Twitter, E-mail Servers, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Garett Rogers

Ok, Twitter and Google Reader aren’t exactly apples to apples, but the new “Notes” feature in Google Reader feels a lot like posting status updates in Twitter. When you type a note, it’s automatically shared with all your friends unless you unshare, and it appears almost as a real article in the reading list of all your friends.

To use the feature, log into Google Reader and click on “Notes” in the sidebar under “Your Stuff”. Type a note, and click “Post Note”, and you are done. Try not to post too many tests because there is no way to delete them, and your friends could get annoyed.

There is a second way to use notes also — while reading an item, you can attach notes to items that you decide to share — this is a good way to let people know your two cents.

I think this feature is awesome — minus how it’s impossible to delete notes. What do you think? Could this give Twitter some competition? Or is it simply a feature on Google Reader that nobody will use?

December 26th, 2007

People demand their public feeds back from Google

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:08 am

Categories: Google Reader, Privacy

Tags: Google Inc., Friend, E-mail Providers, Internet, Garett Rogers

Google introduced a new feature to Google Reader on December 14th that lets you view your friends publicly shared items — little did Google know, that feature somehow ruined Christmas for someone, gave away trade secrets, violated everyone’s privacy and created a huge anti-reader bandwagon that has plenty of room for passengers. People are massively upset that their public feeds are being publicized — to their friends.

I think the problem here, as ParisLemon puts it, is Google’s system for determining if someone is a “friend”. Currently, someone is labeled as your friend if you have them in your Gmail contact list and you have talked with them using Google Talk. Those two things together can almost certainly determine if you know someone well, but it’s a bad way to tell if someone is your friend.

I honestly don’t understand why so many people are angry about this feature — sure, nobody had to “opt in”, but people should know that when they make something “public” (share something that clearly states it’s being made “public”), that you shouldn’t use it to do anything “private”?

“Your shared items are publicly accessible.
They are available as a page at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/11452057738876564749 (and there’s a feed too)” — on the shared items page

I’d like to get a true sense of what people think about this feature. Please take the poll!

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November 30th, 2007

Google now recommends feeds in Google Reader

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 6:56 am

Categories: Google Reader

Tags: Google Inc., Google Reader, Blogging, Channel Management, Internet, Marketing, Garett Rogers

Yesterday, Google rolled out a couple of new changes to Google Reader, their very popular feed reader. The first one is a recommendation list that spits out feeds you might be interested in based on what you are currently subscribed to, and also your web history. This new discovery page helps people find feeds they might otherwise never come across — either brand new blogs that haven’t generated a lot of buzz, or established blogs that have great content, but are not updated very often.

Another feature, that is less interesting but still very useful, is drag and drop. This feature lets users reorder feeds within, or between, folders — previously you would have needed to select a feed, then use the dropdown to move it somewhere else.

Will people use these new features? The drag and drop functionality has helped me arrange my feeds without any hassle, and I’ve already added a few of the recommended items from their discovery page.

Google Reader is one of Google’s products that is often doing interesting things — for example, a while back they created a Wii interface, and more recently, an iPhone version. They were also the first service to fully support Google Gears. If you were working on the Google Reader team, what features would build into it?

November 6th, 2007

Google Reader now very functional on iPhone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:30 pm

Categories: Google Reader

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Apple iPod, Mobile, Google Reader, Advertising & Promotion, Digital Music, Digital Media, Marketing, Personal Technology

It’s not like the original iPhone version of Google Reader was terrible — I used it every day to keep up-to-date on my Google news when access to a computer was inconvenient (which seems to be more often all the time). But the newest version of Google Reader for iPhone/iPod Touch is even better. Now you can easily switch between a summary view of everything, your feeds, and your tags.

Along with the new interface and functionality, anything you do on your mobile is reflected in the Google Reader Trends page separately. Now you can see what you read on your mobile device — not sure why that’s cool, but it is.

Every day I find myself using my iPod Touch as a replacement for my laptop computer. I can do 90% of what I need the internet for on my iPod — to me, that says a lot about the direction things are heading. It’s good to see Google is keeping up with that trend with their mobile products.

September 24th, 2007

Google launches 2 apps for the iPhone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 2:14 pm

Categories: Gmail, Google, Google Calendar, Google Reader

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., E-mail Providers, Real Estate, Web Browsers, Apple Mac OS X, Internet, Business Operations, Operating Systems, Software

Google just launched a new version of Google Calendar specifically designed for the iPhone. To check it out, visit the calendar.google.com from your iPhone browser, or download the Firefox addon that lets you update your UserAgent to make websites think you are using one.

Google Calendar for the iPhone is quite simple and is a lot easier to use than the normal mobile interface. Here is a screenshot:

Gooogle Reader for iPhone
The second unannounced application for the iPhone is Google Reader. Again, it is much sexier than the original mobile interface for the service. It has a distinct iPhone feel and I’m sure it will be used often by iPhone users. This comes after Google made a version of Google Reader for the Wii that makes good use of the Wiimote.

Google seems to be launching iPhone apps left and right — maybe the actual search engine or Gmail will be next? To give the new iPhone interface a try, download “User Agent Switcher” for Firefox and change your user agent temporarily to this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

[via Gmail blog]

September 11th, 2007

Google accidentally leaks Google Reader orientation video

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 4:34 pm

Categories: Google Reader

Tags: Google Inc., Google Gmail, Google Reader, Video, Garett Rogers

A confidential video of an orientation session for new Google employees was accidentally published to the public Google Video index — and several people were able to watch and download the movie before it was taken down.

The video spilled the beans on some new features that are in the pipeline for Reader, and it also gives some “under the hood” talk about how Google itself works. Philipp Lenssen has the scoop on the entire list of items discussed, but here are a couple that I found the most interesting:

• Google will work on a standard for feed publishers to tell aggegrators about changes in the feed (’this post has been deleted’ etc.). Such a standard doesn’t exist yet. They will be working with blog tools like Blogger and MovableType.
• The feed backend now contains 10 terabytes of raw data from 8 million feeds. The index size grows with 4% a week.
• For search Mustang is currently used, Google’s library for creating search engines. Mustang underlies the web search and most other search engines, except for Gmail’s search feature as that requires instant updates and a specific index for each user. Mustang currently handles 1-2 search queries per second, but is able to handle thousands.
• a new feature called Activity Streams will be introduced or at least implemented in Reader this quarter. This will be comparable to Facebook’s News Feed (Minifeed?) feature, and integrate Gmail’s addressbook and contact list.
• Currently there is no plan to integrate Reader with Universal Search. This is because Universal Search doesn’t provide its backends with user IDs (so Gmail results can’t be shown either), and because it requires a lookup time of less than 1/4 second, which Reader cannot provide yet.
• Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.
• Next week, Reader will be released in several languages. One month after that, it will be available in 40 languages.
• Reader has a loyal user base (based on pageviews per user), higher than any other product except for Gmail and Orkut. 70 % of the users use Firefox, so feed syndication is still mostly a geek thing.

September 6th, 2007

Search your feeds with Google Reader, but not with Opera

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:19 am

Categories: Google Reader

Tags: Google Inc., Opera Software, Google Reader, Garett Rogers

One of the most requested features for Google Reader is the ability to search them. It seemed strange that a search company didn’t put a search feature in their RSS feed reader out of the box, but I guess late is better than never.

It works very well — it does what it’s supposed to do, quickly, and that’s all that you can ask for right? Well, I would like to put a couple suggestions into the box. First, fix Opera — since the update, people are no longer able to use Opera with Google Reader. Second, How about an RSS feed for search results similar to what Google News does. This would be great for users who mash their feeds up.

Overall though, I’m extremely happy they finally got around to putting this feature in. What do you think? What are some of the items on your wish list for Google Reader? An iPhone interface (like the one for wii), or better support for Opera?