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Google Reader cutting internal social features, integrating into Google+
- losvedir 15y agoHonestly, 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.
- rachelbythebay 15y agoGreat. I knew this day would come. Guess I need to speed up my work on a Google Reader replacement.
- heydenberk 15y agoThe latter is exactly what I thought!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- joebadmo 15y agoIf they do this right, I don't think I'll even need to visit the G+ site at all. Google Reader is the interface I've always wanted for Plus.
- ukdm 15y agoAwaits the "Best alternatives to Reader" post appearing on HN
- bostonvaulter2 15y agohttp://newsblur.com http://newsblur.com
- vertr 15y agoIt's nice that newsblur is maintained by a HNer, but the aesthetics of it are a real turn off for me.
- jarek 15y agoReally 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.
- masklinn 15y ago> Really confused as to why "read the original site" is a feature. Because the reader does not display images or resizes them, because it's an interesting blog post which probably has interesting comments, because the blog tends to be very well formatted, because there's a video or a slides deck embedded which simply does not appear in the reader, ... I quite often make use of this feature in Reeder.
- ukdm 15y ago6 alts http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3136650 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3136650
- beej71 15y agoWithout 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.
- r00fus 15y agoDo shared circles count as "public circles"? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_users_can_now_share_their_circles.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_users_can_n...
- tristan_louis 15y agoThe 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 15y agoThe 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_louis 15y agoToday, 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 15y agoThey 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
- rednaught 15y agoEach time a prompt for an alternative news reader appears, this one seems to get some attention: http://www.newsblur.com/ http://www.newsblur.com/ I personally just use the newsreader built into Opera now. Just good enough for my needs.
- nextparadigms 15y ago"Absolute Reads: Daring Fireball" Really?
- conesus 15y agoClear 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.
- conesus 15y agoNewsBlur gets attention here because it's built by an active HNer, me. And it's entirely open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay 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/iphone 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.
- nextparadigms 15y agoGoogle 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 15y agoWhere'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 15y ago-1 ?
- nextparadigms 15y agoI 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.
- anigbrowl 15y agoStrongly disagree. Sure, when there is a dislike button a few people use it in an abusive way, but it's obvious that this is statistical noise. But when a majority of votes on a YouTube video consists of 'dislikes' there's usually an excellent reason. The result of having only positive voting is SEO, blogspam, and content farming. Hell yes I want the option to downvote things.
- Oompa 15y agoDo 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.
- jedbrown 15y agoI 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.
- tristan_louis 15y agoI 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.
- hollerith 15y 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 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).
- nathanb 15y agoThis 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.
- levesque 15y agoI 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.
- nathanb 15y agoYou 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.
- RexRollman 15y agoThis. Times one thousand.
- gtaylor 15y agoThen don't share articles. Read them and be happy, like many do.
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- omellet 15y agoI'm mostly upset that Google Reader will now be blocked at work, because the IT dept blocks all social network sites.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoGoogle 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 15y agoI 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.
- tung 15y agoI can't wait for those huge margins to waste my screen space.
- icebraining 15y agohttp://userstyles.org/stylish http://userstyles.org/stylish
- tung 15y agoStylish themes are often out of date and/or completely change the layout of the site when all I really want is a small tweak here or there.
- masklinn 15y 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 15y agoI'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.
- lukesandberg 15y agosharing 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
- omellet 15y agoI 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.
- lukesandberg 15y agoWho is they? are you worried about not being able to access reader anymore because access to G+ may be blocked? That is interesting. Do you have trouble with the new share box on google search because it is a G+ product? Where are you from?
- RexRollman 15y agoI worry that, in an effort to compete with Facebook, Google is going to ruin everything I liked about their products.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- captn3m0 15y agoI find it ironic that the blog post does not have a "Share to google+", or the "+1 Button"
- myhf 15y agoIt does have a +1 button. Maybe you have it adblocked.
- armandososa 15y agoI 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".
- icebraining 15y agoNo, 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.
- r00fus 15y agoI 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 15y agoInteresting 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 15y agoForgive 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?
- icebraining 15y agoLouis 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-replacements#dsq-comment-23863 http://www.extremetech.com/computing/101011-6-google-reader-...
- willy1234x1 15y agoNone 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.
- flarg 15y agoAnd yet the blog post itself is linked to Digg and not G+ Oh Google :(
- twelvedigits 15y agoOne 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.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoThe 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 15y agoMay I ask why you decided to subscribe to other people's shared items if you don't like reading them?
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoI 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.