Googlified

Google Reader added another social feature that lets users to post notes or comment on a feed post and share them with their friends. Post a note is pretty easy, just go to Notes under Your stuff on the left sidebar, type in your note in the text field and click on Post Note, and your note will be shown to your friends using Google Reader and be listed on your Google Reader’s shared items page. You can unshare the items at anytime by clicking on the Unshare buttom.

Sharing a feed post with your note on it is equally easy, but just on Share with note button. The title and content of the post can be edited before sharing. Another fancy thing you can do now is choose a theme for your shared items page, Ice Cream, Ninjas, and Sea, or you can just stick to the default style - clean and simple, the real eye candy.

This Weekend Project #19: build a custom feed reader.

Google Reader now shows the publish time of a post, in the form of a tooltip. To see the post publish time, just move your mouse over the (receive) time adjacent to the post title. I think that both the receive and publish time are adjusted according to your timezone.

Also, Google Reader got a new favicon () a few days ago.

[via Google Operating System]

Last January, Google Reader introduced a feature that enabled showing embedded Flash video player in blog posts from selected video sites. Since then, Google Reader opened itself to more multimedia contents (mostly from Google), like displaying photo slideshows from Picasa Web Albums, Yahoo! Video, Blip.tv, and more recently, Google Presentations slideshow.

I remember seeing a Flash Yahoo! logo one time. Ahh, here it is (I am guessing that Google Reader okays everything from Yahoo.com).

Google Reader today gets a (creepy) new feature that enables you to see your Google Talk friends’ shared items on Google Reader without subscribing to their Shared item feeds, and they can also see your shared items. I called it creepy because not all my contacts on Google Talk are my friends, and even if for those that are, I might not want them to see my Shared items (though it’s already public to everyone on the Internet). Not that I have anything to hide (I don’t have any shared items), and yes, I support the core idea, but that still makes a bit uncomfortable because you know somebody’s watching you somewhere (”This Is The Internet!”).

Sure, you can remove some of these people, but that also removes them from your Google Talk contact list. It would be better off with an option to opt-out. Nonetheless, it would be great for those that need conversation starter with their friends.

Google Reader just added a new page that offers feed recommendations. These recommendations are “generated by comparing your interests with the feeds of users similar to you.” I am not sure what’s my searching trend on Google lately - the recommendations they have aren’t the type of things I like read (SEO, FTW?).

In addition to the recommendations page, you can now reorganize your feeds and folders by dragging & dropping the them (normally they are arranged alphabetically).

There’s still no easy way to rename a tag (a workaround solution is available), what the heck. I don’t think it’s any harder than adding the drag & drop feature.

[second screenshot from Google Reader Blog]

It’s known that Google doesn’t really like to let the public know much about their internal stuffs, like the number of servers they are using. However, one of their internal videos containing confidential information was “accidentally” uploaded to Google Video (now deleted).

Here’s are some “interesting facts” of Google Reader from Google Operating System:

• Google Reader uses 10 TB for storing all the raw data
• Google Reader crawls 8 million feeds
• The rate of user growth = the rate of growth for the number of feeds
• Search requires a lot of computational resources. Google Reader uses two indexes for search: a big tree updated twice a day (150 machines, 600 million documents) and 40 small trees for recent posts, updated every 5 minutes (40 machines, 40 million documents)
• Some upcoming features are also mentioned in the video: internationalization, feed recommendations, and accepting pings sent to Google Blog Search
• More on Google OS and Google Blogoscoped

I am rather surprised that they recorded it in video, and labeled it as Confidential (hands from AlexKing.org), like the word “curiosity” doesn’t exist.

[screenshot from Google Blogoscoped]

After months of waiting, we finally have the searching feature for Google Reader! I am sure that you don’t need me tell you how use the search feature, but I would like to point out that you can choose a specific tag/subscription from the drop-down list for search and there are permalinks for the searches.

They have also added a couple minor features the day before.

Sweet.

[thanks to Manjunath. :)]

According to Google Reader’s Trends feature, I subscribed to 188 feeds, and have read more than 8000 items over the last 30 days. That’s a lot, consider that I only spend a mere few hours on the computer everyday. (lol)

Well, how do I manage to read all that stuff? I don’t. Thanks for Google Reader’s “Mark all as read” feature, I can put all the not-so-important feeds in a folder* (say, “mark-as-read”) and when I have over 100 unread feed items, I can just go to the “mark-as-read” folder, click on the “Mark all as read” button, and puff, half gone. :)

Yeah, you don’t really read it, but I think this is way better than hitting the “J” key 100 times. At least for me. :)

On a related note, Google Reader graduated from the Labs yesterday. Still no search function though :(

*also known as tag and label.

It appears that YouTube is going to allow users to customize the YouTube player, or perhaps they are “preparing a corporate version of YouTube”, as BusinessWeek reported.

Anyways, you can create your own here.

UPDATE: There’s actually a YouTube page where you can customize your players lol. ;) And by the way, Google Reader now has a annoying little icon next to each YouTube video.

[via InsideGoogle]

Several sites, including the Google Reader Groups, reported that Google Reader experienced some outage for hours since late last night till early this morning.

We should be happy once again as it’s working now.

Other than Google Reader is loading noticeably slow today, it didn’t really bother me much because I was sleeping at the time of outage. LOL. :)

Google let’s you to search your emails in Gmail, search photos in Picasa Web Albums, and search documents in Docs & Spreadsheets, but almost two years has passed after its initial launch, Google Reader still lack of a search feature that many users long for, including myself.

Now, Martin Porcheron spot a few rules in Google Reader’s CSS file hinting the search feature probably on its way. (around line 88) The CSS code reveals that the search box will be placed at the right side of the logo.

On a side note, Google Reader today added the Trends link on the pages list, in addition to being the first application that uses Google Gears.

Google Chris Wetherell posted about the birth of Google Reader…

At Google one day, like every day, I was really busy.

Turns out that with Jason Shellen that wasn’t really much of a deterrent. “Why don’t you make an Atom parser in Javascript?”, he asked.

Which, for the non-geeks, is his asking me to make something that turns something into something else which could be used to represent data that was basically about cat photos.

[read the full story]