Google Reader Updates With Still More Social Features

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: It saves time, for one thing. Also, it's more unified, makes the process easier. Less hard on your computer, memory-wise (if you care about that kind of stuff). Mostly, though, it's preference. So do whatever makes you happy.

I use the Share feature (with or w/o adding a note), and have it setup to automatically show up on my Facebook page when I share something from Google Reader.

@Dustin L.: Thanks, Dustin. I find it mind-boggling that Google would activate a "feature" like this without providing a setting for turning it off.

-AP-

Not interested in social features on Reader. Email is all I need if I need to share something IMHO. I wish they put their time creating other new features, rather than this social obsession.

matilde

When does "Social" stop becoming a cool new thing?



News sites now have Social, blogs get Social, every major photo sharing site has Social, Wave brings Social to email, reader brings Social to feeds, and some people even twitter on the toilet.



I thought the whole reason we geeks immersed ourselves in the web was to avoid being Social.

Oh, Google! Thank you so much for devoting so much of your legendary genius on features like these, that no one cares about and hardly anyone will ever use. I assure you, NONE of us Google Reader users want you to implement the simple, blindingly obvious features that ALL of us would use, like saved searches/smart folders. After all, what does Google care about searching?



- AJ

Alaska Jack

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: Well, I can tell you one big advantage, for me anyway: I can access Google Reader from work. I can't access a lot of sites I like to read there, due to the computers being locked down. So i use GR to subscribe to those sites.



- AJ

Alaska Jack

@jwardell: Not quite what you're looking to do, but you can simply click a button to e-mail an article to a friend. It would be preferable for it to stay within the reader, but it's better than nothing.

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: I like using netvibes.com and having 4 or 5 of my favorite blogs there and then I can click on the items to go to the real article.

It still does not allow you to share a post with a specific person (or group). That's the number one thing I've been asking of Reader.

Without that, we have to read shared items that are of no interest to us just because they are of interest to other friends.

If, like me, you don't give a snot about who liked what, I've updated the Google Reader Absolutely Compact style on Stylish to hide the "[x] people liked this" line.



If you don't like the fully compact style, you can make your own style that just has the following to do the job:



.entry-likers {

display: none !important; }

Dustin L.

If only there was a Google Reader Labs. Then you could turn on/off features as you like. The one feature I'm hoping they implement soon is themes. A nice dark theme for night-time reading would make Reader perfect.

LoneWolf008

I love Google Reader and have a few friends who use it as well. We share stuff with each other all the time. The fact that they made the process of following each others' shared items far easier is excellent, at least for me. As for liking items, I feel like Google is going to roll out a digg-like feature wants the liking gets enough traction. See what the most-liked stories of the day were, etc.

greyb1

It really should say what are the most liked items from your feeds and from other feeds you aren't subscribed to.



Currently you can only see which articles that you are specifically reading are liked which is kind of useless.

The5thElephant

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: I subscribe to all my favourite websites in Google Reader, categorise them how I want, and then the content comes to me, I have one site to check for updates rather than going to each site individually and checking whether they have updated.



It just means I consume my sites how I want to, rather than the host site.



And it's Google, and I'm a Google Fanboy.

@Kyle Wegner: I agree on both your points about the buttons. Star and Like should be the same, and the share buttons should be consolidated. It is especially annoying that when you press share with note it does not indicate that it has been shared.

The5thElephant

@MPS: I'm in this camp too, can't figure it out and it's just taking up screen real estate and not doing anything for me, personally. 6 strangers liked the same thing I read? Cool?

cjshrader

I appreciate the additions, I just want to be able to hide the "x people like this" in my news feed.

FawnJagabat

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: When you read/follow hundreds of sites you'll start to understand the usefulness. If I remember correctly Lifehacker used to have a feed that gave you the whole post, just had ads included in the feed as well.

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: Personal taste, I guess - but I'd rather check one site for new articles than 50. The ability to flag articles for future reading is also critical to me.



As for the social features, I really don't care. If i come across something that is of interest to a colleague, I'll just forward a link.

DWHarrison

@MPS: I'd also like to know how too, that's the only thing I don't like about this new update.

Google Reader's social functions are a welcome update I've been hoping to see for a long, long time, but I think they've implemented them a bit sloppily. Now I've got 7 buttons at the bottom of each post (each with keyboard shortucts that need memorizing).



Do we really need a "Share" and "Share with note" button? Nope, combine them. Make the note part optional with every share.



Do we really need a "Star" and "Like" button? Nope, combine them. While this takes away from private sharing, it puts Google Reader more in line with bookmarking sites like delicious, which is a proper move if they are "going social."



Also, simply listing people who "like" a post isn't that useful. We should be able to sort unread posts by # of likes (or something similar).



gReader has come a long way, but it has a lot further to go before it is a serious social tool.

@OCEntertainment: My feelings exactly.



Although, I am also a bit peeved that Google didn't give a way to remove the "## people liked this" lines that are scattered about, and don't work with the Colorful List View GreaseMonkey script I'm using.



Thanks be to Stylish for making that problem go away though.

TheQwerty

I have been using the social features of reader and wish some of my friends would get on board too. It started with a list of shared items in a sidebar box on my personal blog but I have a couple friends "following" me form their Reader now. I spend 90% of my personal online time in GReader so the social aspect makes sense to me.

ryeliSEAN

How do you turn off the "Like" feature? I don't like seeing the "5 people liked this" on every other post in my reader.

MPS

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: The benefit is not having to check all of your favorite sites on a daily basis, everything is steamlined in one place for you and you can create folders to categorize it even more. I have about 150 subscriptions in google reader and I don't have time to go to all the sites everyday. Also, the version in Google Reader is the same as on the site, not stripped down in any way. Try selection "full content." Some sites have an option for partial when you sub in Greader.

groupie

Well about half an hour after this article was recieved in GReader, 27 people had liked it. So people are using the feature now, if they will in a month from now... well, thats less certain

I don't think the social aspect of Reader is really all that helpful, personally. If I'm looking to discuss the topic, I usually go to a site's comments. If I'm looking to share the topic with someone I know, I usually send a link to the article to specific people, many of whom aren't heavy blog readers, (at least not heavy enough to use Reader). So, while it's likely just my personal thing, I don't find the usefulness.



But good on Google for continuing to make new stuff. I always like it when they come out with new features.

I prefer to use Google Reader instead of having to visit each individual website or blog because I can view all of the updates in one single place. I don't think that I'll start clicking the "Like" button or search for random people anytime soon, but I love the feature that lets me share interesting articles with my friends, and also read and comment on the ones that they've shared with me.



It took me a while to get used to reading blogs through RSS, but it just works for me. And if I ever see that my unread items count has gone up to the dreaded 1000+ mark, I just hit "Mark all as read" and move on.

kalemaat

The main advantage for my purposes is that I am able to quickly browse through the headlines of multiple sites at once (by using the 'list' view).

So, if I want to see 'news' websites' headlines, such as NYT, CNN, BBC, WSJ, etc., I can click on my 'News' category and quickly see all of the days news.Prior to RSS, I would need to go to each separate website which was a real time killer and drain on productivity.

I think the main thing with RSS is that if you don't visit many sites in a day, then RSS has less value than if you like to read the news from a lot of sites.

FabianArmstrong

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: Mostly, just consolidation. If you frequent two to five blogs, it's not that huge a help, though it can be. If you're subcribed to thirty different blogs, many with infrequent updates, letting Reader tell you when something's new is more handy then checking them all, only to find most of them don't have any updates.



Also, I don't know about you, but I tend to read through regularly, looking at the newest stuff. If you pop online now and again, looking for an entertaining read, and go "I wonder if there's anything interesting on Lifehacker today", then Reader would be really inefficient.



It's the difference between every once in a while picking up a magazine at a store versus regularly reading the magazine and buying a subscription.



Also, if regularly keeping up is your style, Reader cuts down on a ton of the site bloat you'd get by going to a bunch of different websites, increasing download time.

i've never understood the usefulness either. when i hit LH's front page, i normally get muuuch more information than i was originally looking for. hell, thats how i found LH. i find that when i use my reader, i dont get out as much

I've never really understood the usefulness of RSS readers, online or off. I just go to the sites. Can someone explain the benefits to me? I'm already subcscribed to all of my favorite sites via Google Reader, but I just can't get into the habit of reading the latest updates from there. I'd much rather go to lifehacker.com than read a stripped down version on Google Reader. Sorry if I'm being repititive.

I wonder if they plan to add multiple share list...
eg : Some RSS feeds I like to share with my friends, other feeds I'd like to share with my family etc.

Nope, I don't socialize on Google Reader, that's why I have StumbleUpon. Everyone I want to share w/ is on stumble and I can use it to find cool sites not on the Reader list.

If I can find a use for it, maybe I'll look into it, but as of now I really don't care about it.

ReynaldoRiv

Two critical things:
1) The social object isn't the feed item, but rather the feed item's link URL. This is tremendously important… see examples
2) Bring it to mobile! "iPhone" page for mobile deserves the "Like" treatment.

@FRIEDjellyWALNUT: RSS readers, of which Google Reader is one, are used to alert you to new articles with highlights though the full article can be read from there if the site provides it.

Personally, I use it to scan through all the headlines to find those I might be interested in. Then I "star" them for later reading. I'm a developer and get more than 300 such articles every day. I'm able to narrow them down to 10 or so potentially interesting ones in a few minutes.

I love google reader. It is nice to let my friends sift through the web as well. Depending on who it is, I almost know for sure anything they share I will want to look at.

I can't wait for them to add more features.

I don't agree at all that it is anything like facebook, twitter, etc. It is a completely different idea. Facebook for one, has no idea what they hell they are trying to do apparently, and Twitter is entirely different to start with.

Reader is the only social networking tool I use, if you can really call it that. It is basically just an efficient way to browse the web and share things that you find, that is all it is made for and all that it should be.