Google Data » Chris Wetherell

What do Reader and Heroes have in common?

Chris Wetherell — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:06:00 +0000

Working at Google can be a pretty demanding job. But, as any member of the Google Reader team can attest, at least we're not subject to dangling from a harness that's strapped to one of our co-workers while lasers plot the path of massive cranes to swoop around us at high speeds while we're trying to do our job.

A few months ago, thanks to the graciousness of a group of artists, we saw that in person.

Google Reader is created and maintained by a small team of folks who all have a lot on their plates. Occasionally, we need a vacation. But planning a shared experience that's fun for everyone is tricky. Common points among people can be difficult to find -- unless you get lucky and work with a bunch of dorks who like superhero stories.

It turns out that nearly all of us got sucked into Heroes sometime during its first season, and a good friend of mine knows a director who was going to get to shoot an episode. So we asked if we could visit the set for our team's annual offsite. Despite this seeming like a longshot, a trip was arranged and we headed to the Heroes lot for a day of set gawking.

Be forewarned: nerd-level, in-depth pop-culture details to follow.

Our trip was amazing, and we owe a huge thanks to the director, Greg Yaitanes, and his crew, particularly Ben Grayson (whose attention and help made it a memorable day). Greg is a bit of a TV wunderkind -- he's directed many, many shows, including: Lost, Alias, Grey's Anatomy, House M.D., Prison Break, Nip/Tuck, CSI:NY, CSI:Miami, Women's Murder Club, Bones, Commander In Chief, Children of Dune, Las Vegas, V.I.P, and many more. Looking at his resume makes my eyes water, since he's only a few days older than me and he's done so much that it makes me wonder if I'm using my Saturdays really as effectively as I could.

Watching Greg work was enlightening. He let us sit behind him as he directed a few scenes of tonight's "Cautionary Tales" episode. This one was written by Joe Pokaski, who's been behind some of our more favorite recent moments such as Claire's toe-cutting experiment. The first scene we watched being filmed was an in-car scene featuring Sendhil Ramamurthy (Mohinder) and Jack Coleman (Mr. Bennet, "H.R.G") both of whom we got to meet. We can't post spoilers, of course. But they both turned out to be zombie vampire aliens! (Kidding. Or are we...?)

There were surprises for us on set. First, we were treated to personal time with the creative staff, who graciously explained their work and even took us on tours. We walked within and around many of the common sets used on Heroes, including Isaac's loft, the Suresh apartment, the Company, the Dawsons' beautiful and meticulously created New Orleans home, the police department were Matt works -- and we all jockeyed for picture time in front of the ocular on the Deveaux rooftop.

Mid-day, we were surprised by a visit by Tim Kring, who created Heroes and was kind enough to walk us through the editing rooms and even let us sit in on a "spotting" meeting. Spotting, in this case, meant visually evaluating the progress of special effects of a battle scene involving 17th-century Japanese warriors. We also saw early editions of Kristin Bell (Elle) ruthlessly wielding her power.

Tim was forthcoming, honest, direct and a delight to talk shop with. We ended our day by staying out of Ray Liotta's way (he was on the lot for something unrelated to Heroes) and guessing how the season would end. (Asking us would be futile, we don't know -- really!)

No one needed to be that nice to a group of wandering dorks. From craft services to the heads of production, everyone was incredible and it was a team offsite that's going to be tough to top next year.

Oh Sam I Am, can I read it on the tram?

Chris Wetherell — Thu, 31 May 2007 07:08:00 +0000

Things you can't bring with you on an airplane: Bottled water. Organic shampoo. Google Reader.

I'm happy to announce that our team has fixed one of these problems. Although we find the business of mini bottled water intriguing (and cute!), we've decided to stick to our core business: feeding your reading habit.

As of today, you can use Google Reader offline. Now you can access your favorite feeds in the Golden Gate Park, on the chinatown express, or even traveling 35,000 ft above the Atlantic.

To do this, we've used the newly released Google Gears, a browser plugin that enables offline web applications. Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

A small note of warning: the current version of Google Gears is a developer release. Given this, you may notice a few kinks here and there, but we'll be working hard to iron those out over the coming months. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions as we look to make Google Reader better every day.

Getting embedded in Google Reader.

Chris Wetherell — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:29:00 +0000

We have another small update to Reader regarding video. Reader should now show videos from YouTube and Google Video (and a few other sites) that you have embedded in your blog posts and articles. Some advice on how not to go about filming a feature announcement is included below. (Shot at Sundance Film Festival, too late for awards submission.)

We didn't want this to be just a Google thing, however, so we also currently support videos from other sites like MySpace, Jumpcut, Grouper, IFILM, Metacafe, Revver, Vimeo, vSocial, and games from Monsters and Critics. If your favorite site isn't listed, please tell us in the Reader group and we'll look into adding support, if possible.

Update on 2/7/2007: We now also support Odeo, Yahoo! Video, Brightcove, Dailymotion, blip.tv and MSN Soapbox embedded players.

Careful where you step! We’re moving the furniture in Google Reader.

Chris Wetherell — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:03:00 +0000

We just made some improvements to managing your stuff in Google Reader to better enable doing lots of things at once. If Reader were a house, I guess we just knocked down a wall -- so you can finally get to the bathroom from the bedroom. (And we added a new patio while we were at it.)

A new settings page.
There's now a link in the top right that says "Settings". Clicking on that link opens up a new screen that lists all of your subscriptions and labels, and allows you to make edits to more than one item at a time. We've also added a bunch of new filtering and selection controls. And there's a new feature as well: you can rename any of your subscriptions.

Menus
We've replaced the drawer on the front page with menus for subscriptions and labels. They're faster to load, especially if you have a lot of subscriptions. What's best, the menus allow you to select things without having to shove most of the application out of view.

You are probably already thinking of a number of cool things these changes could allow. You can probably imagine being able to sort subscriptions, or see what things have new stuff in them. Yep. We can too, and we'll be working on that stuff actively.

You can now use Google Reader from your phone.

Chris Wetherell — Fri, 19 May 2006 00:45:00 +0000

Google Reader can now be placed in your pocket, your handbag, your backpack, or thrown from person to person in a game of "keep away". We've just released a mobile-friendly interface for Google Reader.

If you use the Google Personalized Homepage and have installed our Reader Homepage Module, it'll automatically show up on your mobile homepage. Simply go to google.com on your mobile phone's browser and click the link to "Personalized Home".

It's great for browsing your reading list during meetings (not that the Reader team is doing this) or while waiting in line to renew your car registration.

Good times. I'd like to note that the San Francisco DMV is much faster than it used to be, I waited only 15 minutes last month.

Stay tuned … it’s video in Google Reader

Chris Wetherell — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 16:02:00 +0000

In our never-ending quest to help you waste your day in better and richer ways, we've added support for video feeds that have Flash players. Mainly, this means you can watch videos from Google Video or YouTube directly in Reader. Here's a few feeds that work well:

Popular videos (Google Video)
Top rated (YouTube)
Recommended Picks (Google Video)
"Jump"-ing videos via search (Google Video)
Recently featured (YouTube)
Most discussed this week (YouTube)
Google Reader team's recommendations
(YouTube and Google Video spliced feed)

Oh, the hours you can waste!

Fun for publishers: If you have a site that publishes videos as Flash files, then you can add support for your site in Google Reader by adding an enclosure to each appropriate item in either your RSS or Atom feed like the following:

(for RSS feeds)
or
(for Atom feeds)

As we've mentioned before our plan is to add support for the Media RSS extension as well, but we had the enclosure support ready today and wanted to let interested publishers play around with it.

Happy watching!

Subscribing to feeds via little Google buttons

Chris Wetherell — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:20:00 +0000

The web is full of little buttons these days. Little buttons pop up everywhere to email an article, watch a video, play a song, post to your blog, or bookmark a site. They can claim affiliation to various ideas, communities, or ideologies. Browsing the web these days with an eye towards looking at these tiny, active buttons is almost zoological in nature.

See!→

In recent days we added a little button to the button zoo. Google is now offering a little "Add to Google" button which you can put on your site, blog, or corner of the web that can make it easy for people to subscribe to your feed. Here's some instructions for adding the button to your site.

If you'd prefer more direct links from your browser (and if you are a bit brave) you can try dragging any of the following bookmarklets to your links toolbar. Now here's something funny: some feedreaders strip out potentially malicious scripting as can exist in bookmarklets. Google Reader is one, so if you're reading this post from there, you'll have to visit our blog to get 'em. After adding them, you can click them to preview the site you're visiting in Reader and easily subscribe to it. We can't issue a warranty on this approach 'cause we might change something since Reader isn't yet 2 months old. (A toddler!)

→ Subscribe - Views the first available feed in Google Reader.
→ Show all feeds - Lists all feeds and links them to Google Reader. Sadly this link won't work in IE6 with SP2 due to recent changes Microsoft has been making to provide a more secure browser. If you're using Internet Explorer then we recommend skipping this one.

We have our eye on further solutions for one-click subscriptions and like many others we're looking into ways we can help but for now we hope a little button makes for happier subscribing and reading.

Google Reader: Two weeks

Chris Wetherell — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:51:00 +0000

First post! Everyone from the Google Reader team would like to say hello. (Say hello, everyone.)

(Everyone looks up while still typing.) "Hello, internet."

I'm lucky I got their attention - the last two weeks have been a whirlwind. Most products at Google see incredible attention whenever they're released and Reader followed this now familiar pattern:

Speculation
Deluge
Feature requests

Given that some servers survived their newfound celebrity and that all of the team members are still breathing (just checked again) I'm willing to call this a remarkable success. Especially for a Labs launch of this scope and for an actual beta-level project. I'd like a recap now - which is as much for my benefit as yours since we've been heads-down for a bit.

Bellweather, labs

A small Labs effort can be used to gauge the amount of interest in Google helping in some area. Since Reader accounts number in the hundreds of thousands in only our first two weeks of being out there it seems fair to say that there is some. Demonstrated need drives development - so we think we can go ahead with many of our plans which have included more interfaces (the lens is just one of several planned approaches), better ways of recommending new things to you and performance bolstering.

Big kitchen? Big table.

Every few seconds or so there's a bit more of everything on the internet. Feeds reliably so. Reader is using Google's BigTable in order to create a haven for what is likely to be a massive trove of items. BigTable is a system for storing and managing very large amounts of structured data and Jeff Dean just gave a talk about it at the University of Washington and Andrew Hitchcock was nice enough to make a summary for those interested in an overview.

With a little help from the internet

Like many geeks, we love people tweaking, twisting, pushing a technology to be more useful in the ways that suit them best. Here's some recent favorites:

How to use Google Reader, a Flash tutorial by Andy Wibbels
Holizz' favelets list
Godsmoon's bookmarklet
Chris Nolan's Reader badges, buttons, and chicklets

If you develop anything Reader-related drop us a line. We'd be happy to post about it here. We're excited to be making Reader - most of us slept overnight at the office during launch week. It's been an amazing experience.

We're curious about one thing, though, and maybe the developers of other feed reader projects can tell us about their experience when testing their products...

How do you stop from being distracted by, well, the whole internet? It's an endless divertimento - I mean, seriously, it just keeps coming...

Google Reader in the Wild

Chris Wetherell — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 19:41:00 +0000

So we (Google) have launched a service called Reader as an experiment on Google Labs. Reader has been the fascination of a group of developers who were interested in building feed readers and I'm just happy to have been involved so please bear with the occasional confessional-letter cadence since "I never thought these letters were real until...'" can sound silly to anyone who isn't actually the surprised person in question.

Screenshots of Google Reader. You probably know the drill, click to enlarge.

The main window:

Your starred items:

A podcast showing the audio player:

With the drawer open and editing a feed:

With the drawer open, browsing subscriptions and labels.

The gist? It's clear that there's value in keeping up with web content by subscribing to feeds. But the promise of this technology seems greater than, say, the attention paid to its admittedly excellent ability to manage news updates and it's been clear that developers who have been working with RSS, Atom, and microformats have understood that syndication can perhaps be compared favorably, and superficially, to bricks-and-mortar efforts like bridge, dam or canal
building. (For additional metaphoric conflation I'd been considering mentioning the Yangtse River's Three Gorges Dam project to highlight engineering designs for managing floods. Aren't you glad I didn't?)

The web is always been poised to grow. (Duh.) And as a second order effect the amount of information available through feeds seems likely to overwhelm the casual onlooker despite its being potentially useful for them. A (currently) smallish cross-vendor community has been adept at making tools for managing this incredible volume of data available for everyone for years and at Google we're interested in helping out with the resources available to us.

More later. There's a little bit of digital soup being thrown at the newborn. So many people... so many people at the same time...