Google Reader cutting internal social features, integrating into Google+

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/upcoming-changes-to-reader-new-look-new.html

by heydenberk • 15 years ago

140 101 15 years ago

googlereader.blogspot.com

rachelbythebay• 15 years ago

Great. I knew this day would come.

Guess I need to speed up my work on a Google Reader replacement.

heydenberk• 15 years ago

The latter is exactly what I thought!

ukdm2• 15 years ago

Awaits the "Best alternatives to Reader" post appearing on HN

bostonvaulter2• 15 years ago

http://newsblur.com

vertr• 15 years ago

It's nice that newsblur is maintained by a HNer, but the aesthetics of it are a real turn off for me.

jarek• 15 years ago

Really confused as to why "read the original site" is a feature. Getting mainly text, without the original site's design, is one of the best features of RSS to me.

ukdm2• 15 years ago

6 alts http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3136650

beej71• 15 years ago

Without some sort of "public circles" option on Google+, people won't be able to subscribe to my "techstuff" feed--I'd need to manually "subscribe" them. Pretty icky.

r00fus2• 15 years ago

Do shared circles count as "public circles"?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_users_can_n...

tristan_louis3• 15 years ago

The interesting thing is how they are cutting some features to "improve" it. I suspect that when it's done, it will be impossible to send items to Twitter or Facebook from it (you'll have to send things to Google+ instead).

It's also a big question as to what you can do to save your starred items moving forward. Anyone wants to build a starred items to delicious exporter?

dt7• 15 years ago

The article says "in addition to Google+, you'll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To". Also, I'm not sure what you mean about starred items, they're not going anywhere.

tristan_louis3• 15 years ago

Today, I can have a service that looks at my link blog (generated by clicking share) and its RSS feed. By doing so, it can then route new items to Twitter or other services. Reading what the blog entry says, it looks like "Send To" will be the way to route things to other services instead of using Share.

Today, by just clicking "share" I can send the information to Twitter. What the new experience will be, I suspect, is that I will have to click "send to" then choose the service I want to share to. 2 steps instead of one.

It's a small product difference but one that will reduce friction for Google Plus while increasing it for "other" services.

cjdavis• 15 years ago

They are already adding it to the export function - hooray, because I was sorely missing this in the split of my regular Google account from my GA account. The third paragraph reads:

   We think the end result is better than what's available today, 
   and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping 
   Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you 
   may feel like the product is no longer for you. That's why we 
   will also be extending Reader's subscription export feature to 
   include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, 
   and we want to make sure you can take it with you.

   * Your subscriptions
   * Your shared items
   * Your friends
   * Your likes
   * Your starred items

icebraining4• 15 years ago

It's also a big question as to what you can do to save your starred items moving forward.

Any tag/folder in GReader can be exported as an RSS feed. Go to "Reader Settings" > "Folders and Tags" and click on the RSS icon to make it public, then click "View public page" and on that page there's a link to its Atom feed.

Then you can import it to any other reader.

rednaught• 15 years ago

Each time a prompt for an alternative news reader appears, this one seems to get some attention: http://www.newsblur.com/

I personally just use the newsreader built into Opera now. Just good enough for my needs.

nextparadigms3• 15 years ago

"Absolute Reads: Daring Fireball"

Really?

conesus6• 15 years ago

Clear and powerful voice, highly influential, and an eye for good design. And it makes for a great demo of NewsBlur's Original view.

Also, folders are alphabetical and I wanted to put it above the Blogs folder.

conesus6• 15 years ago

NewsBlur gets attention here because it's built by an active HNer, me. And it's entirely open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay. Follow me on GitHub to watch how quickly NewsBlur grows everyday.

In fact, the NewsBlur iPhone app is also open-source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/master/media/iph.... This might be very helpful to somebody learning how to write an iPhone app on their own. I plan to blog about all the techniques and tricks I learned, from the perspective of a Python/JavaScript developer.

wsdrdsw• 15 years ago

Very nice, but why so slow?

abrowne2• 15 years ago

Just created an account and imported my Google Reader feeds. I like what I've tried so far, but it doesn't look like there's an option to sort feeds by oldest first. (Maybe no one else sorts this way, but it's the way that makes sense for how I read feeds.)

cpeterso3• 15 years ago

I love that the NewsBlur home page (for unregistered users) jumps right into the action! As a Google Reader user, I was able to see right away (without having to poke around or register) how NewsBlur works.

svat• 15 years ago

I couldn't tell from the website: does NewsBlur have social features -- can you share items with friends (or even just publicly would also be enough), can you follow others' shared items, and post comments on them?

pixelcloud• 15 years ago

Feedly is really good too.

nextparadigms3• 15 years ago

Google has a lot of redundant social features in other products. This makes sense. I hope they remove the "like" buttons from Youtube, too, and replace them with +1.

DannoHung• 15 years ago

Where's dislike going to go?

I hope they take the Like button on youtube and make it Press +1 rather than getting rid of like and dislike.

fl3tch• 15 years ago

-1 ?

nextparadigms3• 15 years ago

I don't think the "dislike" button is good for the web. If you agree with something vote it, if not don't. You don't have a dislike vote in electoral campaigns.

Oompa• 15 years ago

Do many people use these features? Most of the people that I know who use Google Reader, myself included, just use it as an RSS reader. Sending it to other social networks is the one thing that I do use, and they won't be changing that.

tristan_louis3• 15 years ago

I guess it depends on your workflow. I've been using "Add Star" as a bookmarking service and "Share" as a way quickly Tweet things out. I then mapped "Send To" to Instapaper so I can send longer articles there (2 clicks for Send To vs. Single click for the other two). I've been thinking about a "Send To HN" one, which would be a great addition.

If you read a lot of feeds (According to Google, I have 347 of them), it makes it that much easier.

hollerith3• 15 years ago

>Do many people use these features?

I am a heavy user of the information on how many users are subscribed to a particular feed, which could be considered a social feature. (The information is behind the "show details" link in the "view onto" a feed.)

also, I am subscribed to one other user's "shared link blog" (a view assembled by Reader of that user's "shared items"), which the OP says is definitely going away, and three users are subscribed to my shared link blog.

The "shared link blog" that I am subscribed to is at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/patrissimo although admittedly it is no longer active as the writer (actually, "editor" or "sharer" is more accurate) has moved to using Twitter for sharing links (which I do not like as much).

gchucky5• 15 years ago

Sorry, I'm a bit lost. Is there an intrinsic difference between just following someone in Reader and "shared link blogs", or am I just getting tripped up on naming?

jedbrown• 15 years ago

I have about 30 followers on Reader and I follow a similar number of people. We subscribe to feeds from a bunch of scientific journals and different sections of the arXiv. When we see a paper of interest (or a comically bad paper), we share it. The discussions (private within our approved group) are sometimes quite long and detailed (e.g. 10 pages worth of content in 40 comments). A fair number of collaborations and new papers were born on Reader. I probably see about 100 items per day in my Reader feeds, share a couple, and write a page or two worth of comments. At present, G+ does not keep track of which items I have seen so the interface is not in any way competitive.

I would prefer an integration of G+ circles with sharing preferences on Reader, but I don't want to give up the Reader interface for the much less utilitarian G+ interface. I'll wait and see what this change brings.

mhitza• 15 years ago

I use feedly for my news, and from their website I usually share content with my circles.

nathanb3• 15 years ago

This is horrifyingly frustrating. It's like when they started adding people from my email contacts to my Google Talk friends list or when they thought my gtalk friends list needed to be all up in my Google Reader friends list. Google don't seem to understand the natural partitioning of social spaces that occurs in the real world.

(I do concur that Circles allow this partitioning to be modeled much more accurately than most other social networking systems, but the partitioning before was entirely organic and natural, not constructed. I will wait and see how well they implement the integration before conclusively declaring Reader to have jumped the shark, but honestly the social features ("just enough social to get by", which is about as much social as I can put up with) were the only things keeping me on Reader up until this point.

levesque4• 15 years ago

I don't expect any of the core features of google reader to change. Why would they?

Sure, sharing and friends will be replaced by Google+ variants, but to me that sounds like a good thing. Instead of copying articles and pasting them into Google+, I'll be able to just hit share.

nathanb3• 15 years ago

You are coming from the position that you would like to share articles on Google plus. Is it so inconceivable to you that any other position exists? I have no desire to share articles on G+, and in fact many of the people I share with do not have G+ accounts, nor do they want them.

joebadmo3• 15 years ago

I have the exact opposite experience. I find it horribly frustrating to have all these contacts in different services surfaced to me in weird inconsistent ways.

GTalk are for me a subset of email contacts.

I'm ecstatic that G+ sharing is being integrated with GReader, because I share a lot on GReader, but not everything I share is pertinent to all of my GReader friends.

Ideally, they'll add a "public circles" feature or something like it, that allows people to subscribe to specific subjects that I define and share to specifically, which would be public, but not pushed into everyone's main timelines.

[Edit: To expand a bit, I hope we'll be able to view those public circles in Reader, since that's the ideal interface for it, and not just in Plus.]

[Edit 2: Thinking a bit more about it, I think I'd prefer to consume all Plus content (except maybe photos, I really like the gallery layout) in the Reader UI. I simply find it to be more efficient.

nathanb3• 15 years ago

Here's the problem: when I share something on Reader, I know that it will only be seen on Reader by my other friends who have specifically opted-in to say "I want to see stuff Nathan has shared". It is very reasonable to add a feature allowing me to comment on these shared items, since that's a pretty big value add.

When I share something to Plus, now it shows up to people who are on Plus. They are not in "let's read my RSS feeds" mode, they're in "let's see what my friends are up to" mode. My shared article, instead of being just another item to read and potentially comment on, has intruded on their social activity. If they wanted to read about quantum tunneling, they would have gone to Reader, not to Plus. Plus is where you go to read about your cousin's new haircut.

Raphael• 15 years ago

I also kind of want public groups, but the way it works is you have to search for topics.

anigbrowl4• 15 years ago

Google don't seem to understand the natural partitioning of social spaces that occurs in the real world.

I think they understand it just fine, hence Circles (as you say). This makes my life a lot easier: I use Reader a great deal but have not made much use of the social features as the contact management was poor. I don't want multiple contact lists, it's duplicative and inefficient to have several where one will do.

omellet2• 15 years ago

I'm mostly upset that Google Reader will now be blocked at work, because the IT dept blocks all social network sites.

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Google Reader had social features before.

Github has social features, too; perhaps they should try to block that and see how well that goes over. :)

zavulon• 15 years ago

I really don't care about any social features in Google Reader. The only thing that matters to me is I can continue easily subscribe and read RSS feeds. And with a "brand new design that we hope you love", I sincerely hope they don't fuck that up.

tung2• 15 years ago

I can't wait for those huge margins to waste my screen space.

icebraining4• 15 years ago

http://userstyles.org/stylish

masklinn2• 15 years ago

> The only thing that matters to me is I can continue easily subscribe and read RSS feeds.

Yep. I don't really care about Reader's own UI since I started using Reeder though.

mxavier• 15 years ago

I'm sure Google considered this but I hope that by default, my feed subscriptions are shared with nobody in my Google+ circles and that I have to opt those people in. Doing otherwise would be the equivalent of dumping the contents of your browser bookmarks for all your friends to see. There may be some things people subscribe to that they'd prefer others didn't know about.

lukesandberg2• 15 years ago

sharing is already opt in on Google Reader. So you would have to click "share" and then (most likely) select a circle, there will probably be a default circle but it won't just start spamming G+ whenever you read an article

omellet2• 15 years ago

I realize that. The problem is that they block things by URL in whatever web proxy they use, and if content for Google Reader is coming from a blocked url, it's not going to work for me anymore.

It works both ways; I can actually send mail from my Gmail account via Google Reader, even though they block Gmail. I can't read it, of course, but it's a bit of a hole in their security plan.

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

I worry that, in an effort to compete with Facebook, Google is going to ruin everything I liked about their products.

captn3m0• 15 years ago

I find it ironic that the blog post does not have a "Share to google+", or the "+1 Button"

myhf• 15 years ago

It does have a +1 button. Maybe you have it adblocked.

armandososa• 15 years ago

I actually like these news. I've been using Reader since it came out (what's it? 6 years?) but never get to use to their social features.

Also: star, like, share, tag. Those are too many options. Give me a +1 and a "Share" button and I'm set.

I thought this discussion needed a thread that wasn't all "I hate change".

icebraining4• 15 years ago

No, they're not too many options. (Well, possibly Star, since it's basically a Tag).

Tagging is very different from sharing or liking. It's a feature for organizing specific items (aka posts) for yourself, not for others.

r00fus2• 15 years ago

I concur with you completely.

Though there are sharing options in Reader, it's largely been useless for me, and the same few people who followed me (or I followed) are on G+ now.

hesselink• 15 years ago

Interesting that all the replies here are negative. Am I really the only one who welcomes these changes? Of the people I want to share with, only a few also use Reader. There are much more of them on Google+. This also allows for more fine-grained sharing, so I won't have to share programming-related posts with people who are not interested in that kind of article.

shaggy• 15 years ago

Forgive me for what might be huge ignorance and stupidity on my part but does this mean that I'm now required to have a G+ account to use Reader?

icebraining4• 15 years ago

Louis Gray (G+ evangelist, hired by Google) said in a different site[1] the following:

To clarify, Google Reader remains a stand-alone product. What is being announced is threefold: 1) Addition of sharing to Google+. 2) A new modern design. 3) Retiring of the dedicated sharing model.

This statement ( It will be impossible to use Google Reader as a standalone product) is incorrect. You can continue reading your feeds in Reader independent of Google+.

So it seems we (non-G+ users) won't be affected.

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/101011-6-google-reader-...

willy1234x1• 15 years ago

None of this is frustrating and it shouldn't come to a shock to anyone. Google stated that they were going to deeply integrate Google+ into all its products. This is them just following through.

losvedir• 15 years ago

Honestly, I've always been extremely confused by the Google Reader sharing mechanism. I use Reader all the time, but I've never been clear on who exactly the shares go to. This is much better, IMO.

flarg• 15 years ago

And yet the blog post itself is linked to Digg and not G+

Oh Google :(

twelvedigits• 15 years ago

One vote against. I love Google Reader. I have intelligent friends that share actively on it. I don't use Google Plus. I don't know if those friends use Google Plus. Now, I won't read the articles that my friends are sharing. I also expect sharing will go down as Google forcibly alters user behavior and manages an adoption problem.

In effect, Google is now impeding my access to great information. That's counter to their mission, isn't it? And it's risky to do this to a very loyal user group. Google Reader users are passionate about this product.

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

The first thing I do when I log into Google Reader is mark all "shared items" as read, without reading any of them. I don't want my RSS reader to be social. I don't want my unread count to reflect sources that I didn't opt into. The sooner I can disable all social aspects of Google Reader, the sooner I stop looking for an alternative.

omaranto• 15 years ago

May I ask why you decided to subscribe to other people's shared items if you don't like reading them?

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

I followed these people on Buzz. If you unfollow them on Reader you also unfollow them on Buzz, or at least that's the way it used to work. If that's changed please let me know how to unfollow people on Reader without affecting Buzz or Plus.

Google Reader cutting internal social features, integrating into Google+

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