Last Wednesday, Google Reader introduced a flurry of new features that probably won’t affect my usage of Feedly in the future. They’ve added a couple of time savers, and will once again contribute to the problems of information overload for tons of people. It is also drastically changing whether or not I will continue to use Google Reader.
Social Features in High Demand
What every blogger in the world that uses Google Reader is happy about seeing these days is the following feature:
Oh yes, I thoroughly enjoyed using this new addition today. It’s been a long time requested feature to be able to mark all as read by a specified time, instead of getting rid of all those new items along with the old news that you never read.
The second new feature and one that saves a ton of time also is the addition of the “send-to” feature:
So users of Google Reader can now send those articles straight to Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, and a host of other services. If your service isn’t supported Google Reader provides a way for you to add a “custom service”. Thanks Google! This will obviously step on the toes of a lot of sharing add-ons and plugins, but there’s still a ton of work left to do. For example, I have no idea how a tweet is actually sent. There’s no log-in, pop-up, or anything happening and I don’t know if Google Reader is syncing with my URL shortener of choice (Bit.ly).
I didn’t experience the same problem sending content to StumbleUpon, which opens a new tab of the standard stumble page. However, I’d prefer something similar to Feedly which integrates everything right inside the box along with a confirmation overlay when the action is completed.
Get Rid Of The Excess Fat
In an effort to continue their branding of Google Reader as a more social platform, they’ve added feeds from people you follow.
When we added following, we tried to make it easier to find and follow people who share similar interests. Now we’ve gone even further, and made it possible for you to subscribe directly to the blogs, photos, or Twitter updates that anyone you’re following has included on their Google profile.
This is a completely unnecessary feature for me personally, but it could be Google’s way of picking up an open opportunity where FriendFeed will probably vacate with it’s recent acquisition by Facebook: following everyone’s feed’s in one place. What it becomes now more overload and a half-baked feature that I have no intention of using. I’m also tired of being bugged with the more social aspects of Google Reader. They just can’t keep it simple and I don’t appreciate it syncing with contacts in my address book.
Until the social madness stop, I only have one request for the team behind Google Reader: get rid of the damn duplicate content caused by the stuff I subscribe to and the content shared by my friends.
- What do you think of Google Reader’s recently added features?
- Which features are you enjoying the most?
- What do you hope Google Reader will improve upon in the future?
