Official Google Reader Blog

Reading gets personal with Popular items and Personalized ranking

2009-10-22T15:29:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted with the Official Google Blog)

Today, we're launching two changes to Google Reader to help you discover more interesting content faster. Just as the launch of Personalized Search improved search results based on your search history, these changes use your Reader Trends to improve your reading experience.

Explore section - We're always trying to help you discover new stuff in Reader, and today we're introducing "Popular items" and "Recommended sources", two ways to find interesting content from all over the Internet. We use algorithms to find top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions), collect them in the new Popular items section and order them by what we think you'll like best. Now you don't have to be embarrassed about missing that hilarious video everyone is talking about — it should show up in your "Popular items" feed automatically. And to make it easier to find interesting feeds, we're moving recommendations into the new Explore section and giving it a new name — "Recommended sources." Like always, it uses your Reader Trends and Web History (if you're opted into Web History) to generate a list of feeds we think you might like.
Personalized ranking - Only have a 10 minute coffee break and want to see the best items first? All feeds now have a new sort option called "magic" that re-orders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order. Click "Sort by magic" under the "Feed settings" menu of your feed (or folder) to switch to personalized ranking. Unlike the old "auto" ranking, this new ranking is personalized for you, and gets better with time as we learn what you like best — the more you "like" and "share" stuff, the better your magic sort will be. Give it a try on a high-volume feed folder or All items and see for yourself!

The goal of personalization at Google remains the same as ever: to help you find the best content on the web. We hope these new features help you do just that — go Explore for yourself.

Finally, we'd love to hear your feedback — share your thoughts on our help group, Twitter or the Reader section of Get Satisfaction, a third party support community.

Calling All Ideas!

2009-09-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

The Google Reader team often looks to you, our users, for feedback on the changes we've implemented as well as for help determining our priorities for the future. In that spirit, we're excited to announce the launch of Product Ideas for Google Reader: a tool that allows you to submit your best ideas directly to the Google Reader team and to other Google Reader users.

Have you ever had an idea that would make Google Reader better, more efficient, or just more fun to use? Using Product Ideas, you can submit your idea as well as read suggestions from other users - and best of all, you can vote on the ideas submitted and browse the highest-ranked ideas. We'll get a chance to see and respond directly to the ideas that you, our users, are most excited about.

In addition to submitting product ideas, you can also post links to your own favorite custom bundles and Send To links as well as browse links submitted by others. Using Product Ideas, you'll easily be able to see (and subscribe to!) the highest rated bundles and Send To links as well as expose your own content to a whole new group of Reader users just like you.

Give it a try! Submit some suggestions and your favorite bundles and Send To links and, as always, let us know what you think.

Looking for great stuff to read?

2009-08-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

Where do Arianna Huffington and Thomas Friedman go to get different perspectives on the news? Which economics sites does Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman read? What sites and blogs do the editors of Lifehacker, Boing Boing and Kottke read?

These questions have always interested us, so we decided to approach leaders across a variety of fields and ask them what they read online. We got lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies, and more. We hope this will be a good place for you to find more great things to read, whether you're new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list. Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and subscribe to any of the participants' reading lists, or to any individual sites and blogs they recommend.

All these reading lists were built using Reader's new custom bundles, and we encourage you to create and share your own reading lists for your areas of expertise.

A big thanks to all of our contributors:

News: Thomas Friedman (New York Times), Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post), Michelle Malkin (Hot Air), Paul Krugman (New York Times), Patrick Ruffini (The Next Right), Nicholas Kristof (New York Times), John Dickerson (Slate), Dexter Filkins (New York Times), Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos), Charles Blow (New York Times)
Tech and web: Chris Anderson (Wired), Adam Pash (Lifehacker), Mark Frauenfelder (Boing Boing), Alex Papadimoulis (The Daily WTF), Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land), Jason Kottke (Kottke.org), Annalee Newitz (io9), Meaghan O’Neill (Treehugger), Ben Popken (The Consumerist)
Food and health: Mark Bittman (New York Times), Béatrice Peltre (La Tartine Gourmande), Faith Durand (Apartment Therapy: The Kitchn), Tara Parker-Pope (New York Times)
Trends and fashion: Abby Gardner (Fashionista), Cathy Horyn (New York Times), Danielle de Lange (The Style Files), Carrie Leber (Bloomacious)

We'd love to hear your feedback – please head over to our help group, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.

A flurry of features for feed readers

2009-08-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

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.

PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items

2009-08-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

Speed is very important at Google, and the Reader team is no exception. One way in which we take speed into account is to try to make consumption of feeds be as efficient as possible. We also want to make it as fast (and as easy) as possible to interact with your Reader data on the rest of the web.

We're therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there's a <link rel="hub" .../> element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.

One place that takes advantage of this pinging is FriendFeed. This means if you have added your shared items to your FriendFeed account, you and your friends will see them there within a few seconds the "Share" link being pressed in Reader (special thanks to FriendFeeder Benjamin Golub for making sure the experience was as smooth as possible). You can see this in action in FriendFeed's search results and in the screencast below:

Adding PubSubHubbub support was a 20% project between Brad Fitzpatrick, Brett Slatkin, and myself, each of us working in our spare time over the past couple of weeks. Adding PubSubHubbub to your application is definitely a low-effort but high-payoff way of making the Web faster and more efficient. And if you have any questions or feedback about PubSubHubbub support, you can reach us on our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.

A hearty welcome to NewsGator users

2009-07-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Customize your mobile Reader experience

2009-07-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

Reader's mobile interface for smartphones (iPhones, Android-based devices, and the Palm Pre) is a handy way to keep up with your subscriptions on the go. We realized that we've never officially talked about the settings page for the mobile interface, so here's a quick rundown of the ways in which you can customize your Reader experience to suit your tastes (on your phone, you can find this page by looking for the "Settings" link at the bottom of the screen).

Start page: Choose which folder or view you'd like to see when you first log in.
Link reformatting: Though smartphone browsers can generally render any webpage well, you may still want to reformat webpage (removing most styles and compressing images) if you're on a low-bandwidth connection.
Links in new window: By default Reader will open links in new windows, but if you prefer you can open them in the same window, replacing Reader.
Items per page:^New! Reader normally displays 15 items at a time, but if you have a fast connection or if wish to blast through more items at a time, you can choose to display even more.

We got the idea for the last setting from a blog post, so please keep the feedback coming, whether via blogs, our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.

P.S. Speaking of settings, we've added a checkbox that those of you that are not big fans of liking may appreciate.

Following, liking and people searching

2009-07-15T17:29:00.000-07:00

When we first started improving our sharing features, our goal was to make sharing as simple and flexible as the rest of Reader. Today, we're pleased to announce that we've made four improvements to give you more sharing control and help you easily find other people's publicly shared items within Reader.

Find and follow other people

Instead of sharing your items with others and hoping they reciprocate, you can now find people with public shared items and subscribe to their shared items with one click. Use our new people search feature (powered by Google profiles) to look for people who have public shared items. You can browse by name, location, or topic, and start following new people -- all from inside Reader.

Shhh, just between us friends...

If sharing publicly isn't your cup of tea, we now allow you to share items with a specific group or with multiple groups. If you choose to do this, only people you add to your sharing groups will be able to see and comment on your shared items. If you use Gmail, you will notice that these are the same groups from your Gmail contacts -- so, changes you make to these groups in Reader will change them in Gmail as well.

Take your 15 minutes of fame

If you want people who visit your Google profile to know what you're interested in on Reader, add a link to your shared items to your Google profile. Once you check the box marked "Add a link to my Google profile," anyone using the search feature within Reader will be able to find and follow your shared items.

To make it even easier for people to find you, you can also give your Reader shared items page a custom URL that uses your Google username, like www.google.com/reader/shared/pink.black. You need to enable this under "Profile URL" on your Google profile first.

If you liked it, then you shoulda put a "like" on it

Have you ever wanted to tell an author or publisher that you appreciate an article they wrote? Or maybe you want to let your friend know that you enjoyed the blog post he shared with you. With a quick click of the mouse (or a swipe of the "L" key -- for the keyboard shortcut pros), you can "like" any item in Reader. All "likes" are public, so anyone reading an item you've "liked" in Reader can see that you're a fan. Checking out shared items for people who have "liked" the same items as you is a great way to discover other people with interests similar to your own.

And one last comment about comments

One small note for this release: the ability to see and add comments to shared items is still restricted only to people you have in a sharing group (i.e. "Friends"). So, although your shared items might be public (and publicly discoverable), only people you have added to a sharing group will be able to comment on them.

These features are English-only for now, but as always, keep the feedback coming via our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.

Google Reader on your Google Desktop

2009-05-26T18:20:00.000-07:00

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.

"Life is a great bundle of little things"

2009-05-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had a friend you just knew would love your three favorite blogs about education policy? Do you know all the best sources for celebrity gossip? Or maybe a friend who knows where to get the best baseball commentary? If you've ever wanted to share your favorite feeds, now you can create custom bundles and share them with just a few clicks.

To get started, click "Browse for stuff" and create your own bundle.

Simply drag some of your subscriptions -- or even folders -- to your bundle, add a title and description, and click "Save". Just like Reader's other sharing features, bundles you create can be automatically shared with your Reader friends. You can also email your bundles or post them to your blog. You can even browse all of your friends' bundles -- who knows, maybe one of your buddies is actually an expert in gluten-free cooking.

To get this party started, here are some bundles the Reader team has come up with.

Try making your own bundle. And feel free to leave us some feedback via Twitter or the help group.

Post title quote attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Latest round of Reader improvements

2009-05-19T15:41:00.000-07:00

The Google Reader team has just finished releasing a new version of Reader with a bunch of small changes and tweaks that we thought you'd like to know about.

If you've added enough friends in Reader that you're feeling overwhelmed, we're here to help. We've added a new set of tabs to the trends page called "Friends trends." This way you can see which of your friends share the most, and whose shared items you actually get around to reading.

In other social-related news, we're continuing to iterate on our comments feature. With this release, comments are now available to our non-English users. Additionally, item sources are now visible in the comment view and it's easier to mark items as read there.

Another area that we've focused on improving is the new user experience; we know that a fully armed and operational Reader account can help users go through a large amount of information very quickly, but getting to that point can be daunting. We've recently released a revamped new user page that tries to help with that. In addition to a welcome video and a tutorial, it also tries to help you get started by pointing out the kinds of feeds that you can subscribe to. Our most recent addition to this is the ability to import feeds from iGoogle. This way if you're trying out Reader and already have a heavily customized iGoogle account, your feeds are just a click away.

We've also made improvements to our mobile interface. You can now post notes if an interesting thought occurs to you while waiting in line. For those of you with Android phones, we've also fixed a particularly annoying bug that led to items not being marked as read correctly.

A lot of these changes were made in response to user feedback. Whether it's via Twitter, blogs or our discussion group, please keep it coming.

Meeting friends of friends

2009-05-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

About two months ago we enabled commenting on your friends' shared items. Today, we're happy to introduce some changes to how commenting works, including the ability to start sharing with any of the people who comment on your friends' shared items.

Have you ever read a comment on a friend's shared item and wondered who that person was? In the past, there hasn't been a way to interact with these people besides reading their comments on your friends' shared items. Not anymore!

By hovering over the name of an unfamiliar commenter you can see their profile picture and the links they've added to their Google Profile. Furthermore, you can click the "Start sharing" link to start sharing your shared items with that person!

This is a great way to add new people to your friends list. When that person next logs in, they'll see an option to view your shared items as well as the option to start sharing with you. If they reciprocate, you'll have a new friend in your Reader.

We've also made comments more visible and more flexible from within Reader. Now, you'll be able to see comments on shared items while viewing All items. You'll also be notified when new comments are made by the small speech bubble icon in your left sidebar, even when your Friends' shared items module is collapsed. While making comments, your options for formatting have been increased. Try using asterisks or underscores to spice up your comments with bold and italic text.

Note: You can stop sharing your items with someone at any time by visiting the Sharing settings link in your left sidebar. Also, if someone chooses to share with you, your shared items are not visible to that person unless you consent. Finally, the "start sharing" link in profile cards will also only appear to those users sharing with friends, and not those sharing only with chat buddies.

Google Reader is your new watercooler

2009-03-11T15:21:00.000-07:00

One of the things that we love best about Reader is the ability to easily share interesting items with your friends. In fact, we like it so much that we've been adding bunches of new sharing features over the last year including choosing friends to share with, sharing with note and the sharing bookmarklet. But we quickly realized that one of the most important pieces of the sharing cycle was missing: the ability to have conversations with friends about all those shared items.

With our new conversation feature, you can have private discussions on shared items with your friends. Now, instead of obsessively asking everyone in your office if they have seen that awesome lego cake article you shared last night, they can tell you how awesome you are, right within Google Reader!

What's new with this feature:

You can comment on any items that you share or that have been shared by your friends.
In order to keep track of conversations, you can check out the new "Comment view" which is optimized for tracking conversations and commenting. Comment view is a little different from your normal reading mode because it sorts the list of items by most recent comment. When there are new comments, the "Comment view" link will appear as bold. You can even read the full text of the items in this view by clicking the "Expand this item" (which will mark it as read).
If you see a comment icon on top of a friend's profile picture in list or expanded view, it means there are comments on that item (this helps you decide what to read first.)
When more than one of your friends share the same item, you'll see a separate conversation under each person who shared it, together in the same view.
And don't forget, you can always read and add comments on your iPhone.

Some things to keep in mind:

Comments can only be seen by friends of the person who originally shared the item.
Comments are not yet available in the "All items" view.
We have much more planned for this feature, but we would love to hear what you think, too.
Currently, you cannot comment on items in a shared items subscription or on a shared tag; comments can only be made on items shared by friends.
This release is English-only for now.

We are super excited to bring you this feature, and have plans to keep improving it in the near future. So, find some friends that use Reader, find some cool stuff to share, and join the conversation. Happy commenting!

SXSW 2009 Party: Reader, Blogger, and You

2009-03-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

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!

What we did on our winter break

2009-01-29T20:37:00.000-08:00

After our big launch of the new look and feel, the Reader team took a breather and worked on tying up loose ends (don't worry, we also took some time off). We've just pushed a new release that includes the following set of fixes and tweaks:

Improvements to our rich mobile interface for iPhone, Android and other browsers, including a more compact page header, visual alignment tweaks and a faster loading time.
Links on the home page giving you easy access to your recently read and kept unread items.
Fixes for some "stuck" unread count issues.
Better handling of feeds and items with malformed URLs.
Less flickering when using the "Share with note" bookmark.
Fixing of errors when deleting lots of tags and folders.
Removal of extra image and backend requests, resulting in slightly faster loading times.

One other recent change is that we're now on Twitter. We've been fans of Twitter Search as a way of gathering feedback, but now we have a way of talking back. Feel free to send an @googlereader tweet to get our attention, and follow us for updates and quips.

Finally, we were honored to be nominated for a Bloggie. We encourage you to take a look at all the nominees in all the categories, it's a collection of some really great, subscribe-worthy, blogs

Google Reader for Beginners

2009-01-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

Have you ever had a friend or family member who you know would love using Google Reader? Have you ever had trouble explaining to that same friend or family member just how using Reader could make their lives easier (and more fun)? We sure have, so if you're anything like us then we have some useful tools in store for you.

The Google Reader Team is proud to introduce several new help resources designed specifically at introducing beginners to using Reader: Google Reader Help Videos and the Google Reader Getting Started Guide, both accessible directly from our Help Center.

Feel free to let us know what you think by commenting on the videos or by leaving feedback in our Help Forum. Although the videos are aimed at beginners, we're hoping to eventually cover even more advanced and lesser-known features in the same visual and step-by-step manner.

Now get watching, Readers! And don't forget to send the link along to your favorite beginner, newbie, or visual learner!

Happy Holidays from the Reader Team

2008-12-18T11:55:00.000-08:00

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.

Square is the new round.

2008-12-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

On the Reader team, we know that the old adage "change is good" isn't always true. Sometimes, change is just change. In this case, we hope that these decisions both improve your Reader experience today, and pave the way for additional improvements down the line. So...what's changing, you ask?

Updated look and feel

Google is all about speed, both under the hood as well as in the user experience. So, in order to make Reader act and feel more speedy and responsive, we've removed some visual clutter, simplified some features and given everything a bit more breathing room. Out with the old rounded corners, drop shadows and heavily saturated colors -- in with a softer palette, faster components and a fresh new look.

(old)

(new)

Collapsible navigation

Each section of the navigation pane now has its own options menu and minimize/maximize controls. You can collapse each major section of navigation down to one line and focus on only the things you choose to use.

Friends get promoted

Shared items have grown up and gotten their own section in the navigation pane. You can collapse this entire section and use the title to see everything your friends have shared, or leave it open to track friends with shared items. (Don't forget that you can add new friends in "Sharing settings".)

Hide unread counts

We've heard you loud and clear. For some of you (and some of us on the Reader team), unread counts are a source of anxiety and can feel more like a to-do list than the random awesomeness of the Internet. So to help you sleep better at night, we've added the ability to turn off unread counts for each section of navigation independently. Subscriptions with unread items will still appear as bold, and you can see the number of unread items if you hold your mouse over the subscription name. To really set yourself free, try turning them off for all sections. (Ahhhhhh, now doesn't that feel better?)

More feed bundles!

Feed bundles are small sets of feeds related to a topic that you can subscribe to all at once. Historically, these were done "by hand" by the Reader team, but this just wasn't working out. So we've written a program to make "bundles" for us – no more manual editing of bundles, and a much richer and interesting set of subscriptions for you to choose from. We've added a bunch of new topic-based bundles for easier feed discovery. Just find the "Browse for stuff" link in the main navigation pane and look for the "Browse all bundles" link on the bundles tab. Now, you can learn more than you ever wanted to about NASCAR, yoga or knitting.

Looking for something that's moved?

The "Refresh" button from the subscription list is now in the Subscriptions options menu or triggered by simply clicking on the word "Subscriptions"
The "Show all - updated" controls are now in the Subscriptions options menu.
The "Add subscription" button has moved to the top of the navigation pane.

As always, we love to get feedback in our discussion group, and we look for it in a number of other sources -- please keep it coming!

Is Your Web Truly World-Wide?

2008-11-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

The 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!

Better Cooking Through Reader-ing

2008-11-06T07:41:00.000-08:00

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.

What do Google Reader engineers read?

2008-10-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

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:

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!

We like it graphed

2008-10-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Reading The Guardian, full-text style

2008-10-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

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.

iGoogle launches Reader integration

2008-10-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

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.

One word to describe Google Reader...

2008-10-13T12:15:00.000-07:00

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!