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.

Sony said it will make its Reader available in Japan, China and Australia as well as in European countries including Italy and Spain.

In each country the company said it will work with local retailers, publishers and distributors to introduce the Reader along with local content.

Sony says it anticipates strong global demand for eReaders and eBooks in 2010, specifically in Asian markets. According to analyst firm Nomura Holdings, Asia represents on of the fastest growing eBook and eReader markets, with Japanese eBook sales surpassing $500 million in 2009. Additionally, analyst firm DisplaySearch predicts China will become the world’s largest eReader market by 2015.

"Sony continues to be a pioneer in this market, and in the years since we unveiled the first eReader, we’ve hit a global tipping point in digital reading with demand for and sales of the Reader dramatically increasing in 2009," said Steve Haber, president of Sony Electronics’ Digital Reading Business Division.

"Sony’s strategy has always been to make the Reader a global product and we’ll take a thoughtful approach to country expansion that will consider not just the hardware experience within these new countries but the content experience as well."

The Sony Reader is currently available in eight countries including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.

The company said it will announce availability, local pricing and pre-order dates for the Reader in Japan, China, Australia, Spain and Italy at a later date.
 

Ebooks are a great thing, unless you can’t use them the way that you want to use them or the way that you have grown to use them. Some people highlight massive sections of books to underscore what they think they need to know. Some people write in the margins, and others simply never crack open the books at all. Some students don’t even bother to purchase books thinking that they will never need them in the classroom. All of these are valid uses, and wholly dependent upon the person that is using them.

Realistically there are only a couple of devices that are upcoming and are truly vaporware right now, but if they should come out, and if they can be used in an academic environment there are some must haves based on how people use books. The backend architecture of the school will also have to adapt to meet the needs of how students use books.

The book must be on the device in its entirety, or be available to read without pauses. Some of the ebook systems only allow printing or access to pages one at a time on a limited seat basis. This is not an ebook reader issue, this is a supplier issue. Issues like DRM are also going to play in with how people use books. If the DRM solution does not work with any ebook reader then there are going to be issues, and students will reject the entire ebook solution including the reader.

The book must be highlight able, mark able, and annotate able. These marks, highlights and annotations should be searchable by keyword(s).

Students should be able to print pages with their highlights and annotations intact on the page like it was part of the original content.

It would be great if students working on a team project could share annotations, highlights and notes with each other as they team read chapters in the book. This way everyone can distribute the work load like they would with a normal book, but use technology for what it is intended for, making things easier rather than harder.

Books must stay on the device forever, or if they are removed, the linkages between the notes, highlights and annotations should remain. If a student goes through the notes and wants to read that section again, the book should be redelivered to the student or that section of the book should be redelivered.

Students are not ever going to pay as much for an ebook as they will for a physical book. Some experiments on Amazon with Kindle shows that the best price point for an ebook is between .99 and 2.99 dollars. While no one will get rich at this level, once the book is written, why charge 89 dollars per ebook? We have allowed the ITunes store and other ebooks to train us to expect a price point between .99 and 9.99 dollars. Anything over that makes people really uncomfortable, and might forestall a purchase of the ebook. Even Amazon notes that many ebooks are priced under 10 dollars. People will buy more if they pay less, it works.

Battery life has to be better than 12 hours, preferably 24 hours of continuous use. When it runs out of battery life it should have kept all my notes, highlights and other materials. There is nothing worse than losing hours of work because the battery went flat.

Must have a color screen, this might sound crazy, but if you are taking a media class, you want to have color. If you are taking a web design class, you need to have color. Black and white will not work in this case. And it should render pictures wonderfully, because textbooks often have a lot of pictures to help students grasp the information being presented. A wall of black and white text is not user friendly.

Really this boils down to a usability issue, people got used to using books in a certain way, and our electronic ebook readers should not stray too far from those usage patterns. The question is will the mythical Apple Tablet, Crunchpad or Archos 9 be able to do all these things? While they are not ebook readers, they should meet the minimum points to make these needs end up being part of the design of the device. While the Crunchpad is going to rely more on a cloud based backend, there is no reason why the Archos 9 or Apple Tablet should not allow local storage of information. As the bottom line of all the ways that people use books, ebooks should reflect how people use them.

That is the biggest challenge right now, allowing ebooks to be used the same way that regular books are used.

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cnet news reports about some patents that Amazon has filed in the not so distant past that point to a way or them to deliver an e-book with the traditional book. By putting together ad supported e-books and bundling them at little or no additional cost to the reader Amazon moves a step closer to changing the way people read in the future.

The Kindle and other e-readers require a paradigm shift for those who are not inclined to try new technology just because it is new. Just like people who say that they always want to open a newspaper and get ink on their hands, there are folks who feel that reading one book at a time is just fine and there is no need to carry a library in their pocket. Those pesky traditionalists are the folks that Amazon needs to introduce to the e-book concept in a way that gently nudges them to a new behavior that they wouldn’t otherwise try on their own.

Amazon Technologies, a subsidiary of Amazon, filed for a patent (”Method and system for access to electronic version of a physical work based on user ownership of the physical work”) in December 2006. It was approved last month and makes it possible for buyers of a physical book to have an e-book bundled with it.

But two additional patents, filed a year later by Amazon employees (and not yet approved), are the more interesting ones: these, according to MediaPost, “clearly note that Amazon would insert advertisements throughout the e-books, from the beginning to the end, between chapters or following every 10 pages, as well as in the margins.”

I have to admit that I really don’t care if ads are inserted in books because I have developed such severe ad blindness that I might not even blink. Imagine the day though when the ad is actually part of the story, like product placement in the movies. That’s when the real fun begins.

So do you think having an ad in your book is too much? Have you made the switch yet or are you going to be OK with having a few trees die for your reading enjoyment? Now that wasn’t fair was it?

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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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Users of Adobe’s Reader and Acrobat products will want to perform an update or upgrade today, depending on the software version they have in place. A JavaScript vulnerability received a Critical rating from Adobe, meriting immediate attention.

“This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system,” Adobe said in its security bulletin. “This update resolves an input validation issue in a JavaScript method that could potentially lead to remote code execution.”

People on versions up to 8.1.2 of Reader and Acrobat may update their products with a security fix, currently available for download. Adobe recommended users of Acrobat and Reader 7 update those products to version 7.1.0.

SecurityFocus noted the Information Security Team of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory picked up on the problem with Acrobat and Reader. Vulnerable Adobe products fail to adequately sanitize user input to prevent exploitation.

Such sanitization issues have plagued websites all over the Internet. Their ease of exploitation makes them a favorite avenue of attack for malicious types, a problem exacerbated by failure to detect and update vulnerable products before exploits hit.

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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