Google Reader, the platform Google first launched in 2005, is simply one of the many Google services on the chopping block this week. Google has just put out their annual list of spring cleaning, which consists of features and products that Google is canning in 2013 in order to “focus, otherwise they spread themselves too thin.”

Here’s what Google had to say about Reader in a blog post:

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

“If you’d like to download a copy of all your Reader data before then, you can do so through Google Takeout. You’ll receive your subscription data in an XML file, and the following information will be downloaded as JSON files,” says Google.

You can go here to start downloading your Reader data from Takeout. Google assures users that the data will be easily transferrable to another similar product.

“These changes are never easy. But by focusing our efforts, we can concentrate on building great products that really help in their lives,” says Google.

But from the immediate backlash seen on Twitter and other social media, it’s clear that this decision is not going over well with longtime Google Reader users. There’s already a petition on change.org asking Google to reconsider.

Other Google products to get the axe alongside Reader include Google Building Maker, Google Cloud Connect, and Google Voice for BlackBerry.

So let’s see. Way back in December 2007, Google Reader add the socially option to share items from your RSS feeds with anyone in your Gmail contact list. These people are your so-called “friends,” though most of them you probably haven’t heard from in two years. Last May they premiered the ability to add a note to items you were sharing and share items from anywhere on the Internet. In August, they finally let us better control what friends we shared with.

Now, you can not just share with a note, but share with comments. And the people you’ve shared it with can comment back. In the lovely “Comment view,” found under the Friend’s Shared Items pane, you can browse and share in the shared conversations amongst your friends about items they’ve shared. It’s a lot of sharing.

As a Google Reader user, I guess this is kind of cool. I actually still don’t particularly care for letting my friends share stories with me (but I do it anyway), and it happens so rarely that I don’t know that I’ll be getting into any comment conversations on GReader any time soon. But that’s just me, and I’m sure there are plenty of avid users out there.

As a blog owner/editor, however, I’m not as enthused. I love that subscribers can use feed readers to gather all their favorite blogs’ new posts into one place. But maybe I’m just crazy, but the whole “social” part of blogging is in the comments to me.

By giving subscribers a different, possibly more convenient place to comment, I’ll miss out on that feedback and those conversations. For sad (really). Is there going to be a way to notify feed owners of comments—and if so, would we want to know what people don’t want to say on our sites?

I can see how some things don’t really belong in the comments of a blog post (your friends’ inside joke about Henry Kissinger probably won’t add to a story about him, eh?) and of course, since you can share anything you want in GReader, not every page will have a place to comment. But most of the time, I do feel like the wider audience will be missing out on a lot of the conversation if we fragment things like this.

Whether you agree with the GReader-user-me or the blog-publisher-me, though, you have to admit this is a different direction for feed readers. What do you think? Will you use these features? Will you benefit from them?

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obstinate - ADJECTIVE: 1. Stubbornly adhering to an attitude, opinion, or course of action; obdurate.

Earlier in December, Google Reader began exposing one’s shared items with contacts in Gmail or Google Talk. One chat with a contact meant they could see shared newsfeed items, whether or not the Google Reader user wanted to share with that particular person.

Google’s defense has been one of blinking astonishment. Shared items are public anyway, so what’s the big deal?

The “big deal” is that the shared page does not have an easily guessable URL. The URL ends with a string of 20 numbers. The typical person isn’t going to pull that string out of thin air, append it to Google.com/reader/shared, and see what’s on the page.

Chrix Finne posted a response to the sometimes-heated online discussion of the sharing feature at the Google Reader blog. It’s the same advice as before: manage sharing by tags in Reader; clear out all the stuff people may have seen already by virtue of being eligible to view those items; or punt your friends from your contact list.

The needed fix, which Finne hinted at in saying, “We’re looking at ways to make sharing more granular and flexible,” is precisely that. Just because someone had a chat with a contact one time doesn’t mean the person wants that contact to see shared items if and when he starts using Google Reader.

This analogy may help. Say you work in an office building, in one of several smaller offices. You and your office mates decide to have a potluck and post a signup sheet within your office.

That’s how the shared items page works. Yes, it’s public, but no one is going out of the way to run across the building to a person they chatted with one time for some purely business-related reason and say “look we’re having a potluck on Friday.” This is what Reader’s sharing policy does.

We would like Google to permit sharing with contacts on an opt-in basis per contact, not an opt-out. People who have expressed a negative opinion of the new sharing policy could live with that, as it does not drop a burden of managing opt-outs on them.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/google-acknowledges-reader-sharing-complaints-2007-12/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/former-googler-goes-to-livejournal-2007-12 http://www.webpronews.com/former-googler-goes-to-livejournal-2007-12#comments Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:48:57 +0000 Doug Caverly http://www.webpronews.com/?p=42847 By this time of year, many ponds have frozen over, but we'll still use the analogy: is it better to be a big fish in a small amount of water or an average-sized fish in a lot of the stuff?  Jason Shellen seems to prefer the first scenario, as the former Googler has jumped to LiveJournal.

Frustrated with the need to send people a link to shared items in Google Reader? Got plenty of friends using Gmail or Google Talk? Well pal, Chrix Finne at Google has a deal for you!

Finne wrote at the Google Reader blog about the new feature. Items that a user of Google Reader marks for sharing automatically makes it to a list of "Friends’ shared items" in Google Talk.

Most users of Google Reader likely found out about this the same way we did, by logging in to Google Reader and seeing the notice that Google has helpfully made this change. That would be really great, unless of course one has contacts in Google Talk that one normally does not share stories with from their Reader feeds.

Oops.

However, Finne noted that Google helpfully included an option to clear items shared in the past, so they don’t show up in that Friends’ shared items area.

That’s good.

If one doesn’t want a friend in Gmail or Google Talk to see shared items, the Settings -> Friends tab in Google Reader allows for hiding shared items from friends as desired.

Also good.

But this is a feature Finne and company should have made an opt-in on Reader, by allowing the Reader user to unhide shared items from friends instead of sharing them by default and making the user clear items or hide them.

That’s bad.

Imagine opening up one’s Gmail, seeing a spouse’s shared list, and there are items related to divorce or relocating that the spouse has shared under the previous Reader function with trusted friends.

The result could be unpleasant; Google needs to think real-world impact through before going "taa-daa" with one’s information.

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I think Google is working on a Digg/TechMeme competitor and this is the first in a series of features that’ll bring Google Reader there. All of a sudden my decision to do a link blog using Google’s Reader is looking better and better.

I learned about this over on David Carrington’s blog who demonstrates how it works.

Oh, and we’re in London and having a great time. Milan is as good a traveler as his older brother is. Hardly a peep the entire way. Wifi here in the hotel rocks. It’s always fun to travel thousands of miles just to learn that the Internet works here too! Heheh. Seriously, today we’re probably going to get a tour of the BBC. That should be fun. Last week we got a tour of a Wall Street Journal printing plant (all of the Wall Street Journals that you buy in Northern California are printed about 50 yards from Podtech’s offices. They can print 60,000 copies an hour at that plant alone. It’s amazing the amount of paper and ink they go through there. Makes me appreciate how cool it is that we can distribute ideas via the Internet now and not convince someone to spend so many resources getting our words out there.

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Google Reader gets a new feature which recommends new RSS feeds to you–based on your current feeds and web history–and also receives "drag & drop" functionality–allowing you to re-order your feeds and easily move them to new folders.

Both new features were the handy work of ex-interns at Google!

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!

Here’s how Google Reader’s recommendations work…

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).

And here’s how the drag and drop feature looks…

It looks like the features will appeal to different audiences. Those users that don’t have a lot of feeds, or are just setting up their account, will likely find the recommendations of some use. Personally, I’m more interested in the drag and drop function. I use many folders to arrange my RSS feeds, but the ones I really enjoy reading are often buried in the middle of the list. It’s nice to be able to re-order the list to my preference.

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Google’s team announced a couple of updates to the feedreading service on the Google Reader blog. One of the new items, discovery, involves recommending blogs to the viewer.

Discovery draws from what the person reads in Google Reader, and what has become part of that person’s Web History. The Discovery page lists new feeds, including their title, description, feed URL, number of posts per week, and number of subscribers.

The viewer can subscribe to a recommended feed by clicking a button. Alternately, a “No thanks” link removes the suggested item from the list of recommendations.

Once the individual adds some recommended feeds, the process of organizing them comes into play. Unless they prefer to dump all the feeds into one group and scroll through them alphabetically, the Google Reader user can drag and drop feeds into folders.

The drag and drop functionality also allows for reordering feeds within a list. Rival products have had this feature for some time, making Google a little late in delivering theirs.

The Reader blog touts the way Discovery can suggest new feeds for people hints at some behind the scenes work with Google’s Blogsearch, though it isn’t mentioned in the post. Blogsearch doesn’t get much publicity; it’s just there, and has become a highly effective way to look for information in blogs.

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Currently when you mail yourself something you get this at the bottom of the email

Pretty useful and helpful, however the email a story could use some options, like say for example allowing me just to send the URL. Why would I want to do that, so I could use twittermail to email things to my twitter account. This becomes even more useful for those of us who run/manage multiple websites with role accounts. Sure I could just click through, open the URL, copy the url and change tabs to webmail and copy and paste it, but just think how much better, faster, easier it would be, if I could do it natively in Google reader.

Google’s also trying really hard to get into bookmarking space with their latest attempt Google shared stuff. How about adding that functionality into the bottom of Google reader. You could take it a step further by integrating the bookmarlet functions for popular services like Digg, Mixx, Propeller, Delicious, Sk-rt, Hugg, stumbleupon and others. Just don’t get all creepy and require people to give you the login info, just replicate the bookmarklet functionality.

Steve Rubel has an interesting series on turning GMail into your personal nerve center (part 2). I know you recently added search functionality to Google Reader as well. Well how about taking it a step further and realizing what Steve is trying to do and merging the Google reader search into Google desktop search. While we’re at it hey Ken Norton of Google Documents, can I lobby for adding Google documents into Google desktop search too? C’mon I know you guys can do it you’ve got Gmail married into Google desktop search already.

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