
New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing - abraham
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-design-and-google.html
======
rudyfink
A few thoughts after a some use:

I was part of a community of people I liked, and now, after I clicked a
button, that was gone. I miss those people already. I don't recall anything on
the text that clearly said "oh yeah, stuff will be gone, including your
friends, and we meant to do that."

If I want to share now, I have to do so publicly with the Internet or click a
"share" button way in the upper right and then build up groups. There does not
seem to be an easy way to get my friends back and to get them into a reader
feed. I apparently have to look at my G+ feed if a friend sends me an item. I
do not seem to have any convenient way to filter out those useful posts from
all the spam of G+.

I had easy access to search a list of things that I had found interesting over
the years, and now, I guess I'm going to have to find another program to even
look at that. I do appreciate that it was not outright destroyed, so thanks
for that kindness.

Visually, I'm baffled. Apparently, grey and slightly darker grey are now
visually effective colors for distinguishing things. I can, of course, adjust
to this but overall it does not instill me with confidence.

I am, obviously, now looking for a way back to what I had this morning. If
someone figures that out, I'll thank them. If it's something that needs
support, I'll support it.

~~~
toyg
I don't know why they just didn't try to automatically convert the Readers
categories of users into G+ circles, plus a button "not on G+? click here and
join".

Google -1 on this one.

(and yeah, the new grey-on-grey style is really bad and depressing.)

~~~
smokinn
I don't understand either. I fully expected them to add a new circle for me
called "Google Reader Friends" or something but they didn't. Even better
would've been in that popup saying hey look, something new! to give the option
of creating that very circle. Very big and obvious oversight.

~~~
redwood
Google has a lot of trouble connecting with end users, especially end users
that aren't of the majority of their users (e.g. users who use more than just
search and gmail). This is more confirmation.

------
thesethings
The no-sharing/discovery thing has hit me hard.

If anybody out there has a _social_ RSS reader start-up, feel free to reply to
this and advertise your service. I will drag my friends to it along with me.

(Yes, I use Twitter, Instapaper, news aggregate sites, etc. Yes social
software has changed how i would otherwise discover links/news. But I still
need an RSS reader, and the passive sharing in old Google Reader is a layer of
social that one takes for granted in almost any app. I get why they took it
out (they think they're helping G+), but it doesn't work for me.)

~~~
mjfern
We are working on startup: <http://intigi.com>. You can subscribe to your RSS
or Twitter feeds and then filter the feeds by your interests (i.e., using
keywords).

In terms of social features, you can make any interest public and share it
with others. You can also follow or fork any of the public interests (like
Github).

We are in early stages with the social features (and overall product) and
would really appreciate any feedback/input! You can email me at
mjfern@intigi.com or use the feedback button throughout the site.

Thanks in advance!

~~~
toyg
damn, I fell for it again: joined, didn't particularly like it, decided to
delete my account... and there is no way to do it.

Sigh. You guys keep doing this, and sooner or later some EU commissioner with
half a brain will crack down on the practice, and then we'll all be poorer.

~~~
mjfern
I've deleted your account. :-) We're still in Beta. Can you be specific about
what you didn't like? Please email me at mjfern@intigi.com. Thanks in advance!
Michael

------
ambirex
One early criticism (aside from the sharing bugaboo) is the header is larger
making the allowable reading area much smaller.

the topmost the feed content can be read is ~193px from the top of the
browser. And you can't scroll down because of the way the page it built.

    
    
      Here is what firebug told me:
      29px - account bar
      59px - search bar
      73px - feed toolbar
      32px - feed title bar (in the reading pane)

~~~
edderly
More bars than Dublin...I agree, the waste of space is annoying. I can't even
think of the last time I wanted to search my RSS feeds and it's taking up a
chunk of space.

On a 13inch Macbook add the Mac App bar, Chrome (tabs + search-url + bookmarks
toolbar) a third of the readable area is covered with "bars".

~~~
seltzered_
same setup, i used the minimalist reader plugin to make life easier:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pgpppbiipcfcldpgcj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pgpppbiipcfcldpgcjlhoehdffdjjall)

NOTE: I haven't checked to see if this plugin still works on the new google
reader design.

~~~
edderly
Thankyou! It does appear to work.

------
Kylekramer
From all the outrage, I'll learn that users will love (or perhaps just grow
accustom to) an utterly broken and opaque system as long as it is left around
to grow a community. If you used Google Reader's social features before, you
impress the hell out of me. I never grokked a single element of it after many
years of use. I think Google clearly needed to do something, and integration
with G+ is an obvious move. Perhaps the transition could have been smoother,
but I cannot really see how the old system was superior in any way except for
a very tiny amount of traction.

~~~
lukasb
Ways in which the old system was superior:

\- You interacted with that subset of your friends (and their friends) that
cared enough about reading to use this weird software.

\- You could read your hand-selected feeds, share items and read others'
shares in the same place. It was social reading. Now the reading and the
social aspect are divorced.

~~~
Kylekramer
Seems like the first complaint is actually an improvement in the new version.
You lose the reading focused only culture, but you gain the ability to have
even better granularity. You can share stories with your sports buddies, work
relevant info with your coworkers, local stuff with people in your area.
Before, you were limited to a very niche group. Now, you can share with people
who never even heard of Google Reader or RSS. And if you wanted, you could
make an old Google Reader power readers circle. I think that is a fair trade
off when you are talking about a Google scale application; I think this the
main point everyone is missing, you aren't the typical user. If you were,
Google Reader would be mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook.

Divorcing the social aspect from the RSS reader makes sense. Social reading
should be a subset of Google+, not a layer on top of Google Reader. Google
should improve the reading articles aspect of Google+ (Sparks or whatever
seemed DOA), yes, but the overarching concept is very sound.

------
andybak
Took me a while to realise that you had to click the share button in the far
top right to share the currently viewed item.

The physical separation between the item you're sharing and the screen element
you have to click to share it strikes me as rather counter-intuitive.

~~~
barrkel
Woah. I kept looking for this share button you were talking about - I
completely blanked on the actual Google header bar, which at this point I've
mentally "edited out" on Google sites. My first thought was that that button
would do something stupid - that it would share "Google Reader", not the
currently viewed post.

My problem with the new Reader is the lack of visual indication of read vs
unread items.

~~~
po
_My problem with the new Reader is the lack of visual indication of read vs
unread items._

Yeah, I had a few people complaining in my twitter timeline and I thought,
"Everyone always bitches when something new gets rolled out. It can't be that
bad, come on." I logged in and I wasn't impressed but it was he lack of read
vs. unread that pushed me over the edge.

Here's the main kicker of that: What's the point of marking the unread count
on the left hand sidebar if there's no way to see which ones in the main view?
This is what makes me think it's half-baked. They half-removed a feature.

~~~
anigbrowl
Unread is black on white. Read is black on grey.

~~~
barrkel
What? Where in the item is this grey background for Read state? When I toggle
the "Keep unread" checkbox, there is no discernible change in the item.

~~~
barrkel
If someone would just point out where this grey background is, rather than
downvoting me, that would actually be helpful.

~~~
anigbrowl
On the headline for each feed posting. For example:

    
    
      Blogs.    Posts.
      -------+---------
      blog1  | Unread post    (b on w)
      blog2=>| Old post.      (b on g)
    

Here you're reading blog2, there are two posts, one unread.

~~~
barrkel
That's not what I see, Edward.

Upon close examination, the headline _text_ (not background) for unread is
black on white, while the headline for read is very dark grey text on white.
The headline for the item being currently read is also black on white.

The contrast is almost unnoticeable (I didn't notice it before), in particular
because it's text on a bright background. I'd have to adjust my monitor gamma
to make the distinction obvious, at the cost of color reproduction elsewhere.
There is more variance in the shades of grey of text on my monitor from
_viewing angles_ than there is from this read / unread distinction.

The text varies between #000000 (black) and #222222 (87% black). Good luck
distinguishing 87% black text on a white background from 100% black.

~~~
anigbrowl
Maybe they're doing a/b testing in different markets? Here's a screenshot of
my reader page, the top item in the feed (timestamp 12:23pm) is unread and
should look b/w, while all the items below are b/g.

[https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/RWN8fsl7HjX5SFul8mb7OJ...](https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/RWN8fsl7HjX5SFul8mb7OJ1oXsKWD0E-WYghuOsSSHM?feat=directlink)

~~~
po
Ah Ha! Here's the confusion: You're in list view and I think those of us who
are unhappy are using the 'expanded view'. Under the expanded view, you used
to be able to see the difference between posts and now you cannot. I had been
using expanded view for so long I had forgotten that list view even existed.

So, yeah. The 'read state' of Google Reader is half-baked in expanded view.

------
udfalkso
Back in 2007 I built a social RSS reader called Feed Each Other
(<http://feedeachother.com>). It was actually pretty good, but I had to give
up on it because I ran out of money, Google Reader was slowly stealing all my
features, and I found it very hard to convince people to switch from GR.

It had stuff like:

\- "Circles" aka, letting you group your contacts however you like and see
what each group shared with you and share stuff with all your contacts or just
certain groups.

\- Feed and user discovery and recommendations. "People who read X also read:"
and "Look who subscribes to this feed" type of thing.

\- Keyboard shortcuts, auto discovery, opml import/export etc. All the usual
feed reader stuff.

Check out this old intro video I made for it (social/interesting parts start
around 1:40). The design in the video is out-dated though, it ended up looking
like this, <http://feedeachother.com/screenshot_500.png>.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Ltwh4AO_w&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Ltwh4AO_w&feature=youtu.be#t=97)

Maybe I should turn it back on? Any takers?

~~~
iskander
I've been looking for something similar to what you're describing (and hoping
to stay away from Google & Facebook). However, before you turn your site back
again, are there any other smaller fish out there already filling your niche?

------
GBKS
The new design is definitely cleaner and consistent with other Google
products, but it is not a design focused on providing a great reading
experience (as the product name "Reader" suggests). It is basically the Gmail
layout and interaction model, just different content. I wish Google had taken
an approach that deeply focused on the content first (as Flipboard does).

~~~
phillmv
KEEPING IN MIND that I generally hate people who whine every time every thing
changes,

as someone who is fairly invested in Google Reader, it pains me that this has
been a UI step backwards.

It's lot less usable; defaulting every link to black, like the rest of the
interface, makes scanning for links really painful, and there's still a good
130px of useless interface chrome that is taking up space for no good reason.

Blargh! Looks like I'm going to be loading some custom stylesheets _very_
soon.

~~~
parfe
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/>

I haven't set up a style for google reader (yet) but Stylish extension for
Firefox does a good job letting me customize sites. I don't use it on every
site, but places I view regularly I tweak.

I have a style for news.yc <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085416>

~~~
delackner
Thank you! After installing Stylish they had a style already prepared to fix
reader:

[http://userstyles.org/styles/55550/google-reader-g-
edition-m...](http://userstyles.org/styles/55550/google-reader-g-edition-more-
vertical-space)

~~~
ktsmith
This was exactly what I was looking for. I did make one addition to mark the
read items.

.read > .card { border: 1px solid #f357a1 !important; }

Adds a pinkish border around the cards of read items.

------
atarian
It looks cleaner, but overall it's less readable. The old Google Reader
featured distinct boxes for each news article. But now Google got rid of this
so the articles all sort of glue together and the only way to distinguish
articles is by the focus effect and the headings.

Also I'm not sure what prompted Google to move the star button from the left
of the heading to the right. Titles are variable-length so it doesn't make
sense to put a frequently used UI element in a position where it would
constantly change..

~~~
kisielk
Looks like the star button is now on the bottom left of the post instead, at
least it is in my reader.

------
jcampbell1
This thing has an acre of useless interface and padding. With the rise of
instapaper, safari reader, reeder, readability, etc, how did they possibly
think more clutter was the right direction to go.

I really think Google makes decisions like this: "The data says the search bar
is only used occasionally. Okay, so that means it needs to be bigger so more
people use it." Search in a reader is fine, but it needs to be about as
prominent as "search this page" is in a browser.

------
cpeterso
How do I turn my friends' Google+ posts into RSS that can be consumed by
Google Reader? Google+ does not seem to advertise RSS feeds.

Someone wrote an AppEngine service [1] to transcode Google+ to RSS, but they
shut it down after Google raised the AppEngine feeds.

[1] <http://www.ghacks.net/2011/07/13/google-plus-rss-feeds/>

~~~
abraham
A Googler on the G+ developer group said that atom support is planned. Until
then there is:

<http://plusfeed2.appspot.com/>

~~~
cpeterso
btw, I wrote this PlusFeed bookmarklet to open the appropriate PlusFeed2 URL
for the Google+ user page you are looking:

    
    
      javascript:void(open("http://plusfeed2.appspot.com/"+location.href.match(/^https?:\/\/plus\.google\.com\/(\d{21})\/?.*$/)[1]));

------
joebadmo
It's crazy to me the amount of grousing about the Google Reader cheese-moving.
The old system was an opaque, user-antagonistic, hacked-on mess.

The new system (integration with +) is rational and a superset of the old
system, as far as I can tell.

I also choose to consider this as a precursor to many rational
changes/extensions to Google Reader.

Let me be clear: I am sooo glad that I can finally direct Google Reader shared
items to specific groups, so I don't have to spam everyone who follows me with
every single item, which pretty much guaranteed that 80% of my feed was
irrelevant/stupid/boring to any given person.

Now all I need are public, topical feeds that are subscribable/discoverable.
RSS, in other words.

------
amjith
I hope there is enough contrast between unread and read items. It took me a
while to get used to the gmail overhaul with their new design.

But integration with plus is definitely a welcome change. More often than not,
I've decided against sharing simply because it's inappropriate to everyone
following me.

------
squealingrat
Sigh. I like the redesign (it's about time!) but I hate that they're turning
off sharing. I use that to run my link blog, and now I'll have to figure out
another workaround.

~~~
hosh
Sharing works. Sharing just does not work without publicly +1 the reader item.
(This is a big -1 for me).

~~~
sahaj
As the current top comment notes: You click the "Share..." button on the G+
(black)bar.

~~~
squealingrat
True, but the issue there is that it now takes about 4 mouse clicks that used
to be a single shortcut. To set this link blog (squealingrat.org/new) up all I
needed to do was feed my Google Reader shared items into the Wordpress blog.

------
monty_singh
The inferior UI I could deal with, but eliminating note in reader? Deal
breaker. And it seems they've deleted existing notes. Terrible.

~~~
efraim
You can export the existing notes from settings - import/export.

------
vilhelm_s
Dear Google,

here is what my screen looks like after the redesign: <http://imgur.com/ppg4o>

Notice that about a third of it is used up by various chrome.

Now, I realize that every Google employee is issued two wall-sized hi-res
screens the moment they step up to their desk, and quickly forgets what it was
like to work using mere 21st-century technology. And if they ever use a
laptop, it is always a sleek Chromebook which shows you a full-screen view of
the web and a tiny, exquisitely designed window titlebar in a tasteful shade
of blue.

But for those of us still stuck outside the bubble, it sure would be nice to
have a way to collapse some of that whitespace....

~~~
thewordis
Hit the 'f' key to collapse all the chrome. Mouse-over to get the title bar,
including navigation.

~~~
vilhelm_s
Awesome, thank you!

------
DanielRibeiro
I liked the search by shared items. Thankfully I always star and share,
therefore I can still search (Google +1's search is pathetic, as it is non-
existent).

Still wish they'd give +1 a search tool, and make all the previously shared
items shared on Google+. But then again, this is power-user wishlist, and
Google has been moving away from us.

This is not so bad for Google+, as it has an API, but it is terrible for
Google Reader, as it still doesn't have an API. Guess this[1] issue was not
starred enough on Google Code...

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=29>

------
wvl
I don't know why tristan_louis' comment is dead, but they bring up very good
point, far more egregious than either the social sharing changes or the design
and screen real estate issues:

 _The first thing that struck me is how much slower this reader is. There
seems to be a refresh on every new move forward, which was less noticeable on
the previous version, if at all. There also seems to be a substantially slower
response time, on the order of a couple of seconds._

Reader is now painful to use, imo. I'm constantly waiting for it to catch up
to my actions.

------
FilterJoe
Problem: Can no longer access old "notes" or "shared items"

Solution: Turn them into "starred items"

Details: You can only access notes or shared items from certain mobile or
desktop clients. I don't know exactly which ones but the one I used was
MobileRSS (iOS). Go into the "notes" folder and manually star every item (you
don't need to star "shared" items because all of them are notes, but not all
notes are shared items). If you want them in chronological order, you'll need
to start with the oldest first, the second oldest second, etc. It took me less
than 10 minutes to star my 131 items.

If you don't do this, you can't view or search for anything in "notes" or
"shared items." However, you CAN view and CAN search them so long as they are
starred items.

So far as I know, there is no longer a way to get content into Google Reader
via the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet. It is no longer supported. This means
that any site without an RSS feed cannot have any pages brought into Google
Reader, so far as I can tell.

I wonder if there is a service that turns a site into an RSS feed on the fly?
Then you'd be able to subscribe temporarily and star the item. Probably not
convenient enough to use as a read it later (or archive in Google Reader)
service, as I've been doing for the past couple years.

I've found that the easiest way to search for archive-worth web pages I've
read years ago is to search my stash in Google Reader. Using a search engine
doesn't always find old stuff which may be buried in search results or no
longer on the web.

------
neonkiwi
Google Reader circa yesterday provided an inbox-style interface for all of
your content. A feed had read and unread items, and folders allowed you to
compose macro-inboxes, and (this is the change) shared content was treated in
the same way, if not better—new comments on this content would be clearly
indicated, allowing for in-app discussions.

Today, Google Reader has made shared content a second-class feed. With the
removal of the inbox-style interface, if you miss a friend's shared item on
Google Plus (possibly buried in other items), it's gone. The closest you can
come to a 'mark as unread' functionality is through a work-around: creating a
memberless 'save for later' circle, to share items with. Furthermore, shared
content isn't even visible within Google Reader.

I can't be alone in thinking this was a good interface for sharing articles.
If anybody has an alternative RSS reader with this functionality, please let
me know. I would pay for this, but I can see it being a tough sell generally.

Conesus, I think you've mentioned in a different thread that you have social
features in the pipeline: is this something you're aiming at?

------
GraemeL
Overall, with the minimalistic Greasmonkey script, it's not bad. One thing
that I don't like is that in expanded view, there is no visual indication to
differentiate read from unread items. In list view, read items are grey. Why
didn't they do something similar in expanded view? I keep having to look over
at the unread count on the left.

------
chimeracoder
I must say, this new design is much less readable. I'll probably end up
abandoning the web interface altogether and reverting to using Google Reader
simply to synchronize my feeds across platforms.

Back when I used WIndows, I used FeedReader, but I'm not sure what other
programs are out there for Linux or Android that sync with Google Reader.

------
squealingrat
Someone should tell the GReader guys.... <http://cl.ly/BRqw>

------
anigbrowl
I think the sharing complaints are overblown (although common sense would have
said that they should be ported over into a new G+ circle or something
similar). I do think that Reader was badly in need of an overhaul and that
bridging it with G+ will turn out to be a winner.

But damn, that color scheme is oppressive. It's the New Web Brutalism. I hope
that once everything Google is using the same design template they'll offer
themes again and let you have one look across all Google products. This
whitewash-and-grey with carefully rationed rectangles of primaries is
depressing, like a grand opening in North Korea. I'm not saying that to be
funny: looking at it makes me feel gloomy and want to do...something else. I'm
using Google Docs less as well, for the same reason.

------
pieter
I don't really care anymore about the design of Google Reader. The only thing
I use it for is for syncing my read items between my different reader apps
(like Reeder for iPad). As long as they keep supporting that I'm fine, but
this seems like a service anyone could implement in case they stop the API
access.

------
mike_ivanov
So how do I remove those two gargantuan toolbar-like thingies taking almost a
third of my screen?

------
_frog
I had a shot at redesigning the page to make better use of space and condense
down the many, many toolbars.

<http://cl.ly/BRCs>

------
zmanian
Sort by magic seems to be intermittently breaking. Or more accurately the
ordering of items seems to be changing dramatically on refresh.

------
mhw
Hmm; they've also stopped supporting IE 7, which isn't good for those of us
who sometimes inhabit corporate-lockdown-land.

------
RexRollman
Does using Reader now imply a membership in Google+? I am not interested in G+
but I would like to continue using Reader.

~~~
gchucky
Not necessarily. You can use Reader now to read documents, but sharing is done
through email, or pushed to G+.

------
algorithms
"A new Android application will follow soon."

------
Codayus
The lack of contrast between read and unread items ridiculous. The following
custom CSS makes it bearable:

#entries .entry .card-common { background: #eee} #entries .entry .card-actions
{ background: #eee }

#entries .entry.read .card-common { background: #fff} #entries .entry.read
.card-actions { background: #fff }

