We know that nothing will be quite like Bloglines in the hearts of its users, but if you're looking for another online feed reader, we encourage you to give Reader a shot. All you need is a Google account (you already have one if you use Gmail) -- and here's a video to help you get started. It's also very easy to bring your Bloglines subscriptions over, you just have to export them from Bloglines and import them into Reader.

Since Reader's fifth anniversary is also approaching (though it feels like yesterday, Reader was launched on October 7, 2005), we thought it might be a good time to reflect on how Reader has grown over the past few years. While we were busy redesigning (twice!), making friends with Buzz and iGoogle, translating, breaking up, gossiping and playing, more and more people picked up the Reader habit. Here's a graph of Reader users over time (where "user" is defined as someone who has used Reader at least once a week):

And as we found out this past April, Reader users sure do like to read lots of items. Here's another graph, this time of the number of items read per day.

To all our users, new and old, thanks for making a great 5 years!

We know that nothing will be quite like Bloglines in the hearts of its users, but if you're looking for another online feed reader, we encourage you to give Reader a shot. All you need is a Google account (you already have one if you use Gmail) -- and here's a video to help you get started. It's also very easy to bring your Bloglines subscriptions over, you just have to export them from Bloglines and import them into Reader.

Since Reader's fifth anniversary is also approaching (though it feels like yesterday, Reader was launched on October 7, 2005), we thought it might be a good time to reflect on how Reader has grown over the past few years. While we were busy redesigning (twice!), making friends with Buzz and iGoogle, translating, breaking up, gossiping and playing, more and more people picked up the Reader habit. Here's a graph of Reader users over time (where "user" is defined as someone who has used Reader at least once a week):

And as we found out this past April, Reader users sure do like to read lots of items. Here's another graph, this time of the number of items read per day.

To all our users, new and old, thanks for making a great 5 years!

Simplifying comments

Ever since we launched support for comments on shared items, one of the most frequent points of confusion has been "who can comment on my shared items?" (or rather, "why can't I comment on my friends' shared items?"). Up until now, someone had to be in a designated sharing group to be able to comment on a post, even if you were sharing publicly. To make things a lot simpler, we've made it so that if you can see a shared item, you can comment on it.

For those of you who are sharing publicly, the next time you log in to Reader you'll get a choice between continuing to share publicly and allowing anyone to comment on your shared items, or switching to protected sharing:

Nothing will change for users who already had their shared items protected, since visibility and commenting for their shared items was already consistent. Keep in mind that you can always update who can view and comment on your shared items on the sharing settings page.

Phasing out support for older browsers

Reader is joining Docs (and many other sites) in removing support for older browsers, notably Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.0 and 2.0, Safari 2.0 and 3.0, and Chrome 1.0, 2.0. and 3.0. Reader is a cutting edge web application, and this will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers. Starting on June 1, users of older browsers will begin to see a notification encouraging them to upgrade to any of Reader’s supported browsers.

Discontinuing offline access via Gears

We launched offline support three years ago, but only a minority of Reader users actively use it today. Because supporting offline access requires a large ongoing engineering effort, and because Gears itself is being surpassed by HTML5, we've decided to remove offline support in Reader starting on June 1.

Of course, we know that offline access is important to some of you, and with the wide range of third party clients that sync with Google Reader, you don’t need to give it up. Depending on your operating system, we recommend taking a look at:

• NetNewsWire (Mac OS X)
• FeedDemon (Windows)
• Liferea (Linux)

Each of these alternatives will sync your subscriptions and read state with Reader, and continue to provide offline access to your feeds. For more information, please see our help center.

We realize that removing features and support is not easy, but with this spring cleaning done, we've laid the groundwork for more Reader improvements down the line. We apologize for any inconvenience, and if you have any questions please head over to our forum, or message us on Twitter.

Simplifying comments

Ever since we launched support for comments on shared items, one of the most frequent points of confusion has been "who can comment on my shared items?" (or rather, "why can't I comment on my friends' shared items?"). Up until now, someone had to be in a designated sharing group to be able to comment on a post, even if you were sharing publicly. To make things a lot simpler, we've made it so that if you can see a shared item, you can comment on it.

For those of you who are sharing publicly, the next time you log in to Reader you'll get a choice between continuing to share publicly and allowing anyone to comment on your shared items, or switching to protected sharing:

Nothing will change for users who already had their shared items protected, since visibility and commenting for their shared items was already consistent. Keep in mind that you can always update who can view and comment on your shared items on the sharing settings page.

Phasing out support for older browsers

Reader is joining Docs (and many other sites) in removing support for older browsers, notably Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.0 and 2.0, Safari 2.0 and 3.0, and Chrome 1.0, 2.0. and 3.0. Reader is a cutting edge web application, and this will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers. Starting on June 1, users of older browsers will begin to see a notification encouraging them to upgrade to any of Reader’s supported browsers.

Discontinuing offline access via Gears

We launched offline support three years ago, but only a minority of Reader users actively use it today. Because supporting offline access requires a large ongoing engineering effort, and because Gears itself is being surpassed by HTML5, we've decided to remove offline support in Reader starting on June 1.

Of course, we know that offline access is important to some of you, and with the wide range of third party clients that sync with Google Reader, you don’t need to give it up. Depending on your operating system, we recommend taking a look at:

• NetNewsWire (Mac OS X)
• FeedDemon (Windows)
• Liferea (Linux)

Each of these alternatives will sync your subscriptions and read state with Reader, and continue to provide offline access to your feeds. For more information, please see our help center.

We realize that removing features and support is not easy, but with this spring cleaning done, we've laid the groundwork for more Reader improvements down the line. We apologize for any inconvenience, and if you have any questions please head over to our forum, or message us on Twitter.

Oh wait, not that kind of Polish, this kind of polish.

As we've often done in the past, the Reader team has taken the time between major releases to work on small features and bug fixes. Here's a round-up of the changes we've made over the past month:

We've added support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags, so that when you come across an awesome video you can share it in such a way that your mobile device-using friends can see it too.

We realize that our recommended items may not always hit the spot (though who wouldn't like a water slide in their house). There is now a "Not interested" link at the bottom of recommended items, so that you can both hide that item and provide signals to our algorithms about the kinds of things you like and dislike.

Reader is the kind of application that people keep open in a tab all day. While it's flattering that our users are so dedicated, we want to make sure that they don't miss out on any new features and bug fixes that we release. We've therefore added a small banner that appears whenever we release a new version. If you're in the middle of something, you can ignore it (and it'll go away for a while), but if not, newest and shinier things are just a click away. Incidentally, today we built the 500th version of Reader; over the 5 years that we've worked on Reader, that works out to almost two builds a week.

A few improvements to Reader Play: When you hit space (or shift-space), you're now automatically moved between posts, and for posts with multiple images, cycled through each image. We've also added made Play more configurable by letting you change the URL used:

• If you add a welcome=0 query parameter, the welcome screen is skipped, even for new and signed-out users.
• An autoplay=1 query parameter can be used to start moving through posts automatically.
• A #feed/<URL> fragment allows you to display a specific feed.

You can combine all these to make automatically playing slideshows of your favorite photoblogs.

Finally, we've done a few other small things, like the Home view loading faster, and the Send to functionality being less susceptible to being stymied by popup blockers when used with services such as Twitter.

The way we prioritized these tweaks and fixes was based on forum and Twitter feedback, so please keep it coming.

Oh wait, not that kind of Polish, this kind of polish.

As we've often done in the past, the Reader team has taken the time between major releases to work on small features and bug fixes. Here's a round-up of the changes we've made over the past month:

We've added support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags, so that when you come across an awesome video you can share it in such a way that your mobile device-using friends can see it too.

We realize that our recommended items may not always hit the spot (though who wouldn't like a water slide in their house). There is now a "Not interested" link at the bottom of recommended items, so that you can both hide that item and provide signals to our algorithms about the kinds of things you like and dislike.

Reader is the kind of application that people keep open in a tab all day. While it's flattering that our users are so dedicated, we want to make sure that they don't miss out on any new features and bug fixes that we release. We've therefore added a small banner that appears whenever we release a new version. If you're in the middle of something, you can ignore it (and it'll go away for a while), but if not, newest and shinier things are just a click away. Incidentally, today we built the 500th version of Reader; over the 5 years that we've worked on Reader, that works out to almost two builds a week.

A few improvements to Reader Play: When you hit space (or shift-space), you're now automatically moved between posts, and for posts with multiple images, cycled through each image. We've also added made Play more configurable by letting you change the URL used:

• If you add a welcome=0 query parameter, the welcome screen is skipped, even for new and signed-out users.
• An autoplay=1 query parameter can be used to start moving through posts automatically.
• A #feed/<URL> fragment allows you to display a specific feed.

You can combine all these to make automatically playing slideshows of your favorite photoblogs.

Finally, we've done a few other small things, like the Home view loading faster, and the Send to functionality being less susceptible to being stymied by popup blockers when used with services such as Twitter.

The way we prioritized these tweaks and fixes was based on forum and Twitter feedback, so please keep it coming.

However, even with all these great features, sharing has been mostly limited to the subset of your friends who use Google Reader. While many people use Reader, we know that even more use Gmail. That's why today, we're thrilled to announce that with the launch of Google Buzz, the awesome items you share in Reader can also be shared with all your friends who use Gmail with Google Buzz.

A shared item in Reader (background) and Buzz (foreground)

Getting started with Google Buzz is easy. Just head over to Gmail and you'll be able to link up your Google Reader account with just a few clicks. Then, anything you share in Reader will automatically be posted to Buzz. Comments are even shared between both products, so you can view and participate in the conversation wherever you'd prefer.

And don't worry, you don't have another list of friends or followers to manage. The people you follow in Reader are the same people you follow in Buzz – those you've already chosen to follow in Reader, plus the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.

Check out the video below, explaining everything you can do with Google Buzz!

Head to our help center for more details about the Buzz integration in Reader, or leave us feedback in our forum, on Twitter or even using Buzz itself.

P.S. Keep in mind that Google Buzz is rolling out gradually, it might be a few days before you get it for your account.

However, even with all these great features, sharing has been mostly limited to the subset of your friends who use Google Reader. While many people use Reader, we know that even more use Gmail. That's why today, we're thrilled to announce that with the launch of Google Buzz, the awesome items you share in Reader can also be shared with all your friends who use Gmail with Google Buzz.

A shared item in Reader (background) and Buzz (foreground)

Getting started with Google Buzz is easy. Just head over to Gmail and you'll be able to link up your Google Reader account with just a few clicks. Then, anything you share in Reader will automatically be posted to Buzz. Comments are even shared between both products, so you can view and participate in the conversation wherever you'd prefer.

And don't worry, you don't have another list of friends or followers to manage. The people you follow in Reader are the same people you follow in Buzz – those you've already chosen to follow in Reader, plus the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.

Check out the video below, explaining everything you can do with Google Buzz!

Head to our help center for more details about the Buzz integration in Reader, or leave us feedback in our forum, on Twitter or even using Buzz itself.

P.S. Keep in mind that Google Buzz is rolling out gradually, it might be a few days before you get it for your account.

Let us know how you like the extension (and what other features you'd like to see in it) by adding a review on its page in the extension gallery.

Note that extensions are currently available only for the beta channel of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux, so you'll want to make sure you're running one of those browsers before you install the extension.

Reader users may want to try the RSS subscription extension too. It adds previewing and one-click subscribe support for any RSS or Atom feed that you happen to come across. And feel free to browse or search for other handy extensions.

And if you're a developer itching to write your own extension, you'll want to check out the extensive documentation and code samples.

Let us know how you like the extension (and what other features you'd like to see in it) by adding a review on its page in the extension gallery.

Note that extensions are currently available only for the beta channel of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux, so you'll want to make sure you're running one of those browsers before you install the extension.

Reader users may want to try the RSS subscription extension too. It adds previewing and one-click subscribe support for any RSS or Atom feed that you happen to come across. And feel free to browse or search for other handy extensions.

And if you're a developer itching to write your own extension, you'll want to check out the extensive documentation and code samples.

We realize that not everyone wants their subscription list to turn into a multi-colored extravaganza, so we've made it into a setting that you can access from your subscriptions menu.

Be on the lookout for more ideas being implemented, and feel free to let us know how you like this feature on Twitter or in our help forum.

We realize that not everyone wants their subscription list to turn into a multi-colored extravaganza, so we've made it into a setting that you can access from your subscriptions menu.

Be on the lookout for more ideas being implemented, and feel free to let us know how you like this feature on Twitter or in our help forum.

We're therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there's a <link rel="hub" .../> element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.

One place that takes advantage of this pinging is FriendFeed. This means if you have added your shared items to your FriendFeed account, you and your friends will see them there within a few seconds the "Share" link being pressed in Reader (special thanks to FriendFeeder Benjamin Golub for making sure the experience was as smooth as possible). You can see this in action in FriendFeed's search results and in the screencast below:

Adding PubSubHubbub support was a 20% project between Brad Fitzpatrick, Brett Slatkin, and myself, each of us working in our spare time over the past couple of weeks. Adding PubSubHubbub to your application is definitely a low-effort but high-payoff way of making the Web faster and more efficient. And if you have any questions or feedback about PubSubHubbub support, you can reach us on our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.

• Start page: Choose which folder or view you'd like to see when you first log in.
• Link reformatting: Though smartphone browsers can generally render any webpage well, you may still want to reformat webpage (removing most styles and compressing images) if you're on a low-bandwidth connection.
• Links in new window: By default Reader will open links in new windows, but if you prefer you can open them in the same window, replacing Reader.
• Items per page:^New! Reader normally displays 15 items at a time, but if you have a fast connection or if wish to blast through more items at a time, you can choose to display even more.

We got the idea for the last setting from a blog post, so please keep the feedback coming, whether via blogs, our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.

P.S. Speaking of settings, we've added a checkbox that those of you that are not big fans of liking may appreciate.

If you've added enough friends in Reader that you're feeling overwhelmed, we're here to help. We've added a new set of tabs to the trends page called "Friends trends." This way you can see which of your friends share the most, and whose shared items you actually get around to reading.

In other social-related news, we're continuing to iterate on our comments feature. With this release, comments are now available to our non-English users. Additionally, item sources are now visible in the comment view and it's easier to mark items as read there.

Another area that we've focused on improving is the new user experience; we know that a fully armed and operational Reader account can help users go through a large amount of information very quickly, but getting to that point can be daunting. We've recently released a revamped new user page that tries to help with that. In addition to a welcome video and a tutorial, it also tries to help you get started by pointing out the kinds of feeds that you can subscribe to. Our most recent addition to this is the ability to import feeds from iGoogle. This way if you're trying out Reader and already have a heavily customized iGoogle account, your feeds are just a click away.

We've also made improvements to our mobile interface. You can now post notes if an interesting thought occurs to you while waiting in line. For those of you with Android phones, we've also fixed a particularly annoying bug that led to items not being marked as read correctly.

A lot of these changes were made in response to user feedback. Whether it's via Twitter, blogs or our discussion group, please keep it coming.

• Improvements to our rich mobile interface for iPhone, Android and other browsers, including a more compact page header, visual alignment tweaks and a faster loading time.
• Links on the home page giving you easy access to your recently read and kept unread items.
• Fixes for some "stuck" unread count issues.
• Better handling of feeds and items with malformed URLs.
• Less flickering when using the "Share with note" bookmark.
• Fixing of errors when deleting lots of tags and folders.
• Removal of extra image and backend requests, resulting in slightly faster loading times.

One other recent change is that we're now on Twitter. We've been fans of Twitter Search as a way of gathering feedback, but now we have a way of talking back. Feel free to send an @googlereader tweet to get our attention, and follow us for updates and quips.

Finally, we were honored to be nominated for a Bloggie. We encourage you to take a look at all the nominees in all the categories, it's a collection of some really great, subscribe-worthy, blogs

I started using Google Reader around the same time that I started cooking more – in fact, it was probably Reader that inspired me to really get into cooking. Shortly after Reader launched, one of my friends recommended a cooking blog, Chocolate & Zucchini, and I subscribed to it. I really liked reading about new recipes on the blog on a regular basis, and I would star the ones I particularly liked so that I could find them later. Soon, I was subscribed to many more cooking blogs, and was starring more and more favorite recipes daily. My starred items list became very long, and it was becoming hard to find things that I remembered I liked (this was before Reader had search).

This is when I discovered item-level tagging. Instead of just starring each recipe I liked, I would also add a tag (or several tags) to it. My tags were generally divided into meal ideas (e.g. "dessert", "breakfast", "main-course") and ingredient specifics (e.g. "eggs", "vegetables", "meat", "pasta"). This way, if we were having people over and one of the guests was vegetarian, I would browse through my pasta and vegetables tags for ideas on what to make. Even after Reader added search, I continued to star and tag my favorite items. Search is very useful when you know what you are looking for, but less appropriate when you are just considering what to make for dinner and don't have anything too specific in mind.

The last tags that I have created for my item-level tagging are "cooked" and "cooked-good". This way I can keep track of all the recipes that I have actually tried out, and not just read about. And any time I am feeling in the mood for something (somewhat) familiar, I can browse through my "cooked-good" tag.

When we heard about the iGoogle team's plans to have a canvas view (allowing for much richer content), we thought it would be great to help a brother (or is it sister?) out. We therefore took on the task of powering iGoogle's new canvas view for feeds. Now you can get the same powerful Reader interface for any feed in iGoogle, complete with keyboard shortcuts, expanded and list views, infinite scrolling and embedded videos.

For those of you who are Reader users already, the Reader gadget has also been updated to take advantage of the canvas view: you can now share, email and browse through your folders and subscriptions, all within iGoogle.

You can see both the new feed view and the updated Reader gadget in action on the updated iGoogle.

Better yet, followed blogs also show up in your Reader account, in their own folder. That way you can get the full power of Reader's tagging, sharing and starring without having to maintain two separate reading lists. Of course, if you'd rather not see followed blogs in Reader, there's a setting to hide them.

We hope you'll have fun playing with Blogger's new social feature. And if following brings you to Reader for the first time, welcome!

I've long maintained that CSS is one of the most well-kept (and consequently under-exploited) accessibility secrets of the Web. Thinking back to the time that CSS1 became a W3C Recommendation, those of us who cared deeply about accessibility took great care to ensure that the end-user had a lot of control with respect to how content was displayed -- yet, end-user tools that allow users to leverage this capability have been rare.

As we were experimenting with Google Reader using AxsJAX, one of the enhancements we prototyped was the addition of a simple CSS-based lens that allows the user to selectively magnify the current article. Notice that this is subtly different from using a generic screen magnifier -- in that later case, you end up magnifying the entire screen. Google Reader can be smarter; since it knows which article you are currently reading, it can selectively magnify just that article upon request. This results in much better use of screen real-estate -- something that is an even scarcer resource when you're a low-vision user.

After prototyping this via the AxsJAX framework, we decided that this feature made sense for exposing to all our users -- we have now integrated this functionality into the main Reader interface. So with this lens in hand (your pocket) you can continue to hit j and k to move through articles, and when you find the print too small to read you can press = or - to enlarge or shrink the font of the article you're reading. The C in CSS stands for Cascading -- and in this case, you the end-user get to have the final say in how you consume your content by cascading your request for a larger font on top of the presentation chosen by the content publisher.

-Raman

photo by groundzero (CC-licensed)

More languages and countries: Reader is now available in Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland, Brazil, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.

Subscriber counts: If you were curious how many other subscribers a feed that you read has, you can now easily check: use the "show details" link in the top-right corner. Additionally, to see how indie/hip you are, you can use the "Most obscure" tab on the trends page to see the feeds that you subscribe to with the least number of subscribers. Just keep in mind what these numbers indicate.

Increased reading area: By shuffling some things around in the header area, we've managed to squeeze an additional 17 pixels of reading space for feed content. This may not seem like much, but every little bit matters when consuming hundreds of posts a day.

Bug fixes and performance improvements: We've made Reader faster to load when you have more than a thousand subscriptions. The settings page should feel perkier too. Finally, we've squashed some bugs -- most notably, bugs that prevented profiles from loading in certain cases. We also added improved keyboard navigation and fixed a problem refreshing search results. A lot of these tweaks and bug fixes are in response to user feedback that we get in our discussion group, so please keep it coming.

Google Reader Keyboard (inspiration)

The "j" key (which takes you to the next item) is perhaps the most well-known keyboard shortcut. However, there are many more keys to press, and I was curious to see just how much they were tapped in Google Reader. A quick analysis later, I came up with a simple top-10 list, and I thought it would be fun to share. The units here are "milli-Js", where 1,000 milli-Js are equivalent to all the presses "j" received.

Of course, Reader has more than the 10 shortcuts listed above -- you can see them all in this list. Additionally, in some ways, the most important shortcut is not "j", but "?" (that is, shift-/). It shows you a cheat-sheet of all the other shortcuts.

Partly based on the data we gathered, and in our quest to make Reader as keyboard-accessible as possible, we've actually added a few more with the latest release. You can use "a" to open up the "Add subscription" form, "g" then "d" to go to the "Discover" page, and "g" then "f" to go your friends' shared items. If you have any other keyboard shortcuts you would like, feel free to mention them in our forums.

I was having a hard time finding the right job here in Houston. Days would go by without talking to a single recruiter. But then I started using Google Reader to subscribe to custom-made job search feeds for craigslist, and for oodle.com (which already aggregates feeds from thousands of other classified ad websites).

Soon I found myself flying all over the country interviewing for jobs. The employers always pay for the flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. My job hunt became like an exciting vacation! I've been to New York twice, Milwaukee, Austin, Los Angeles, and Miami. I just accepted an offer in Manhattan with a very competitive salary offer. Google Reader saved me a huge amount of time and effort with the job hunt. Thanks guys!

Gary's experience is a great reminder about the power of feeds. Feeds exist for all sort of information beyond blog and news sites and are a great way to receive timely updates. Here are some more examples of these atypical feed uses:

Finance: Both Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance let you get finance news updates for specific companies and stocks, just look for orange "Subscribe" or "RSS" icons in your browser. To receive stock quotes (only for some stocks), you can use NASDAQ's feeds.

Weather: You can get weather updates from The Weather Channel, WeatherBug, or NOAA's National Weather Service.

Classifieds: As Gary mentioned, both craigslist and Oodle.com offer feeds for all of their listings. Just look for the orange "RSS" link at the bottom of any results page -- when you subscribe to a search, for, say, apartments under $1500 in Manhattan, you'll get updates when there are new apartments matching that search. Similarly, in eBay you can find an RSS link at the bottom of any search page, and in Google Base near the top-right corner.

Package tracking: If you'd like to track packages that have been sent by UPS, FedEx, USPS or DHL/Airborne, you can use isnoop.net's universal package tracking or simpletracking.com.

Social networking: Facebook offers feeds for many of its features; you can see notifications, status updates, and your friends' posted items in Reader, as explained on this page. For those of you that are Twitter fans, you can get RSS feeds for many of its pages.

Shopping: Amazon lets you get feeds for the latest popular products as well as wish lists (look for the orange feed icon). Many other shopping web sites offer feeds, including Yahoo! Shopping, MSN Shopping, and NexTag.

Saved searches: Google Blog Search, Google News and most Yahoo! sites (among others) let you subscribe to search results as feeds. This way, if you want to monitor a topic, you don't have to keep running searches over and over again.

This list of sites is not comprehensive, feeds are finding their way into more and more places. Be on the lookout for the orange feed icon, so that you can save time and keep track of everything that interests you.

Google subscriber counts: These numbers include subscribers across all Google services, including Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. You can see them in Reader's feed search results (pictured below) and the Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, our crawler reports them to the publisher each time we fetch the feed. Reader's feed search was recently showing stale and incomplete data, but as of today (October 15) the numbers should be the same everywhere.

FeedBurner numbers: If you use FeedBurner to manage and track your feed, you will see a subscriber count there that is attributed to "Google Feedfetcher." This number is a sum of all the feeds that you have redirecting to your FeedBurner feed URL. So if http://www.example.com/atom.xml has 3 subscribers, http://www.example.com/rss.xml has 7 subscribers and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Example (where you redirect the other two feeds now) has 12 subscribers, then you will see 3 + 7 + 12 = 22 subscribers reported in the FeedBurner interface.

What this all means if you're a feed publisher is that if you're interested in getting the most comprehensive overview of your subscribers, you should be using a service like FeedBurner or Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand, if you're a Reader user, we hope you take advantage of the numbers that we now show next to search results, so that you can pick the most appropriate feed to subscribe to.

Doesn't seem all that special, does it? Most Google sites have it. But let's look at where it is:

That's right, search is finally in Google Reader. Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you'd like to search for "ipod" so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today's announcements.

Search lets you use keywords to find items in your subscriptions (if you're looking to search all blogs, give Blog Search a try). If you subscribe to someone's shared items, it'll search those too. This handy feature is brought to you especially by Ben and Chris's tireless engineering work and Jenna's relentless iteration on user interface concepts.

Along for the ride in the search release are a few other Reader tweaks. You can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. Unread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. Finally, Reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you've navigated to.

If you'd like to let us know how search is working out for you, or have any other Reader feedback, you can use our shiny new forums to get in touch.

Video Appetizers

Reader is centered around subscribing to feeds, but it's not always easy to explain to others what feeds are, who makes them, and why you'd want to subscribe to them. Worse yet, sometimes they're "feeds" and sometimes they're "RSS" -- and what is this "Atom" thing anyway? This RSS in Plain English video does a good job of explaining all that, in a very unique style.

Also on the topic of videos, Chris made a short clip showing all the places he's used his offline Reader. If you or anyone you know would like to know just why you'd Google Gears-enable an application, this showcases it pretty well:

For a more in-depth discussion of Gears and Reader, you can watch Aaron Boodman's presentation from Google Developer Day.

Embedding Entrées

Many folks like our gadget, but sometimes wish even more of Reader's features could be accessed from within iGoogle. With Michael Bolin's Your Page Here gadget, you can embed all of Reader (or any other page, for that matter) as its own tab within your iGoogle page.

For all you Facebook users, Mario Romero has created a Reader application that allows you to embed your shared items into Facebook profile. It's a bit finick-y (you have to type in your 20-digit Reader ID), but it shows how open platforms (Reader's and Facebook's) can be used together without needing permission from either party.

Fun Desserts

We've posted before about add-ons that others have made for Reader, but they've generally been of a functional nature (like notifiers and browser buttons). The Google Reader Theme that Jon Hicks made is entirely unlike that in that it doesn't add any functionality, it just makes Reader look very different (some might say Mac-like). A fresh face for Reader can be a lot of fun, and we were happy to see just how seamless Jon managed to make it.

Finally, if Reader is just too serious for you and you'd like to view your feeds through a lolcat perspective, Ian McKellar's LOL Feeds may be the thing for you.

Some weekend hacking confirmed my suspicions, and the rest of the team also seemed to think it'd be a neat side project. As some have discovered, we recently flipped the switch on this feature. If you'd like to try it out, simply visit reader.google.com on your Wii (you may find it even easier to just do a Google search for "reader"). Keep in mind that this is something very experimental, the labs of Google Labs if you will.

If you're curious to see what it looks like, here's a recording:

You'll also notice that Reader on the Wii takes advantage of the famous Wiimote:

• up/down: scroll up/down
• right/left: next/previous item
• 1 button: show subscriptions
• 2 button: show links

When showing subscriptions:

• up/down: previous/next subscription
• right: select current subscription
• left: close
• -/+: collapse/expand folder

If you'd like to try the Reader interface in a regular browser, visit www.google.com/reader/wii to go into Wii mode. The Wiimote buttons all have keyboard equivalents (e.g. the "1" key for the 1 button).

Now that this is done, I've heard that the Commodore 64 has a web browser...

Based on the comments that the gadget is receiving at the directory, we've made quite a few improvements to it:

• A "mark all as read" link so you can more easily catch up
• Unread counts for your reading list and tags
• Better support for themes
• The ability to sort items oldest-first

If you'd like to see other features in the Reader gadget, just add another comment. And if you haven't added it to your homepage yet, you can do so with this button:

Until now, putting your shared items in your blog required some technical chops, since you needed to copy and paste some code into your template. We'd always wanted to make this easier, so we worked with our friends on the Blogger team. As a result, the entire process now only takes a few clicks for Blogger users*.

All you have to do is click the "Add to Blogger" button on the put a clip on your site page in Reader (found in Settings). Now anytime you share something, your blog's readers will know about it too. It's more fun than a blogroll and always up to date.

* Just to be clear, this only works if you've upgraded to the new version of Blogger. We switched the Reader blog to it a few weeks ago, and it's been working out great (no more waiting for publishing to finish).

With this in mind, I've always wondered how I could apply this interest to Reader's feature set. It then occurred to me that there were plenty of things that could be dug up about the items that a person reads and the feeds they are subscribed to. Perhaps some feeds post very often but don't actually get read, so they may as well be removed. Conversely, other sites may not have updated in ages, so they're just taking up room in the list of subscriptions.

Playing around with these ideas, I created a simple Reader "trends" page, inspired by Google Trends as well as the Search History Trends page. After showing it to the rest of the Reader team and a few other interested Googlers, I began to gather feedback and implemented it. Most helpful was when Jeff and Doug rolled up their sleeves and applied some of the same thinking that went into Measure Map to this new Reader page. This went beyond just making things pretty; they helped make things easier to digest and understand.

The result is the Reader Trends page, accessed via a link from the "Home" page. For example, it lets me see the spike in read items two days ago (the result of my New Year's resolution of staying on top of my 322 subscriptions). There are also my subscriptions sorted by various criteria, so I can see which I'm having trouble keeping up with. Each subscription has a unsubscribe icon next to it, which I've used for those that I decided were not worth keeping around.

If you have any New Year's resolutions about time management or are a chart geek like me, trends should be useful and fun. You may discover things about your reading habits that you didn't know.

Here are a few add-ons that we've discovered recently:

Google Reader Notifier (Mac): This open-source application adds a menu-bar icon which keeps track of new items within your entire reading list or just for a particular tag (the latter is useful for people like me that are subscribed to a lot of feeds and want to know only when the important ones are updated). Troels Bay, the author, has been revving the application on a regular basis, and it's getting better and better.

Gordita: Reader has one-click starring and sharing of items, but you may want to do the same to pages outside of Reader. Gordita lets you create a bookmarklet that allows you to copy Reader items that interest you to del.icio.us, along with all the other items you've bookmarked over the Web.

Google Reader Optimized: This set of user styles maximizes the reading area. When you want to sit down and power through hundreds of items, you may find this compact, stripped-down interface preferable.

Controlling Google Reader with a Cell Phone : This add-on may be a bit out there, but in a nutshell it allows you to control Reader with your Bluetooth cellphone. Perhaps if used in combination with the full-screen style above, you can build your own Reader 10-foot user interface.

Reader Button for the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer: If you use the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, this custom button gives you one-click access to Reader and notifies you of new items via a changing icon.

Updated at 11am with the Toolbar button.

• The shared items clip that you can embed on your site will not interfere with other JavaScript that may be running (sorry about that, Stephanie).
• A confirmation message is now shown when coming in from the "Add to Google" page (this includes the feed subscribe functionality built into Firefox 2).
• Searching for feeds using keywords now works in Opera.
• The scrolling position is now always reset when moving between feeds or folders (meaning items won't inadvertently be marked as read if you're using scroll tracking in expanded view).
• The "none" color scheme for publisher clips now works (no more creative workarounds required).
• The email that we supply for sending shared tags to friends now contains the right link.
• Using the "next" bookmarklet correctly marks all items as read when displaying an entire blog. (We had been overly aggressive here, and marking items as read into the future as well!)
• Items from different feeds or folders are no longer mixed together when clicking between them quickly.
• Keyboard shortcuts in Internet Explorer should continue to work after using "gt" or "gu" (the tag and subscription selectors).

We also snuck in a small feature with this release: when you subscribe to a feed, you'll get an "Add to a folder..." drop-down. This way, you can move that feed to a folder right there and then, without having to go to the settings screen.

Pick your start page: You can now select which page you'd like to see when you first log in to Reader ("Home", "All items", or any folder or tag). Simply go to settings and on the Preferences tab pick which one you'd like to see.

Hiding the left side: If you'd like to get the list of subscriptions on the left out of the way so you can focus on what you're reading, you can just hit the u key (press it again to go back to the regular view).

Refreshing: We've added a small "Refresh" link at the bottom of the list of subscriptions, so you can easily refresh them to see if there are new items. Better yet, they will automatically refresh every few minutes, so you shouldn't even have to click the link. When an unread count has changed, it will flash yellow for a split-second to help you find it. This yellow fade made our Web 2.0 meter that we have in our office move up a tick.

Space is smart again: The space key now intelligently goes from item to item and from page to page (for longer items), just like it used to in the old interface.

In addition to all this, we've also fixed a few bugs. Your feedback in the discussion group has been very helpful in helping us prioritize, so please keep posting there (even if we don't reply to every single message, we are reading all of your comments).

This usually isn't of direct interest to end users, it's just matter of which namespaced extensions a feed reader supports, and the more the merrier. However, since there are quite a few ones out there, developers must make trade-offs and decisions. One easy way to prioritize extension support is to see which ones are used more often.

I wrote a small MapReduce program to go over our BigTable and get the top 50 namespaces based on the number of feeds that use them. This means that we only looked at feeds that have at least one subscriber, i.e. the "feeds that matter." Note that the default namespaces for syndication feed formats (e.g. http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom for Atom 1.0) are excluded, since I was interested only in extensions to the elements that are already expected to be in a feed.

We thought this information might be of interest to others, the way our analysis of XML errors and web authoring statistics have been. If I have missed anything, or if you have any feedback, a message in our discussion group or a link to this blog post is the best way to reach us.

Reading list ordering defaults: Your reading list can be sorted in different ways (by date or "automatically", which shows you more relevant items first). Additionally, it can have read items hidden or always visible. Until this week, the default combination was to sort automatically and show read items. Unfortunately, this meant that new items did not necessarily end up at the top, which was confusing to some users. We've therefore changed the defaults to sort by date and hide read items. If you prefer a different combination, these settings can be controlled by the links at the bottom of your reading list (pictured on the right).

Related subscriptions menu: When we made the recent improvements to reading by subscription or label, we neglected one use case, which was to see a list of subscriptions that have a particular label. Based on feedback from our users, we've added a new menu, "Related subscriptions," that shows up when selecting a label or a subscription that has labels.

Starring in the mobile interface: Our mobile interface is handy for when you're on the go, but occasionally you can come across an item that you would like to re-read when you're back at your computer. Until now, the mobile interface provided no way to flag an item so you could find it later. Now all items that you read have a "Add star" link at the bottom of the page, so you can easily add it to your starred items.

Bugfixes: As usual, with each release we try to polish Reader by fixing bugs here and there. Some recent ones that we've squashed include: better Safari support on the settings page and when marking items as read, better support for non-audio enclosures and better support for relative URLs in entries.

A lot of these changes were made in response to user feedback and bug reports. The best way to make yourself heard is to post in our discussion group.

Jason Toal has put together an excellent screencast that covers nearly all of the features that Google Reader has to offer. If you know someone who is new to the application, point them to it and they will quickly get up to speed. Even if you are a seasoned user yourself, you may be interested in the more advanced features that are covered, such as sharing.

Speaking of our sharing feature, people have figured out very seamless ways of integrating clips into their sites.

Eli Dourado has written GROSX, a notifier for Mac OS X that tells you when you have new items to read in your Reader account. In addition to a menu bar icon, GROSX also integrates with Growl, allowing you to get notifications of new items with cool translucent overlays. GROSX also lets you monitor a specific label so that, if you have 390 subscriptions like me, you can monitor only the really important things.

Here's what it looks like:

Like the regular Reader interface, the module remembers what you've read, can sort your reading list in different ways, and allows you to view items by label. Additionally, you can view items directly on the page in a nifty floating bubble. Finally, there's a few non-obvious things you can also do:

• If you add more than one instance of the module, you can tell them to display different labels, use different sorting orders, etc. It's almost like building your own Reader interface.
• You can use mouse scroll wheel (when hovering over module) to scroll the item list up and down.
• You can click the "edit" link and customize many things about the module.

P.S. Just wanted to give a shout-out to Nick Lothian, who had written an unofficial Reader homepage module much earlier on, tiding our users over. Thanks Nick!

P.P.S. If you're looking for a way to move your homepage feed modules over to Google Reader, this OPML export module comes in handy.

• Deletion: You can now delete labels you don't need or use anymore.
• Auto-completion: So that you don't have to remember if it's "friends" or "myfriends", we now provide an auto-complete drop down menu that shows you labels that match what you've typed in so far. You can use the arrows and enter key to pick from the choices.
• Easier application: To begin labeling an individual item, just hit the L key on your keyboard.

We've also made it easier to unsubscribe from feeds (each one has an "unsubscribe" link next to it in the list). Finally, we've fixed a few bugs, especially with the sharing section and clips.

Reading lists as screensavers

Mac OS X Tiger has a nifty screensaver that can display any feed with cool swooshing text. Here's how to view your reading list in it:

1. Using Safari 2.0, load your reading list feed
2. Add a bookmark for that feed
3. in the "Desktop & Screen Saver" preference pane, select "RSS Visualizer"
4. From the "Options..." sheet, pick your reading list
5. Enjoy your new screensaver!

Windows users shouldn't despair, there are plenty of options for that platform too.

Reading lists as Live Bookmarks

Firefox has a neat feature where feeds can be viewed as Live Bookmarks. This means that you have your reading list, your starred items, or even any label can be one click away in the toolbar. To use this feature, use Reader to navigate to the label you want to use. Then click on the feed icon in the upper right corner and choose "Add '<your name>'s starred items" Live Bookmark". You should now have that item in the toolbar, as pictured on the left.

Reading lists for podcasts

Reader has had an inline podcast player for a while. However, one of the core attractions of podcasts is that they can be taken on the go. As a web app, Reader can't really function as a podcatcher. However, this doesn't mean that you have have two completely separate lists of subscriptions, one in Reader and one in your podcatcher.

1. Subscribe to your favorite podcasts and give them a label such as "podcast"
2. Using our sharing feature, make that label public
3. Copy that label's feed URL
4. In iTunes, select "Subscribe to Podcast..." from the "Advanced" menu and paste in the feed URL.
5. You will now have a feed that lists all your items from Reader, so you don't have to worry about keeping it up to date in iTunes.

While we used iTunes as an example, this should work with any application that supports Atom 1.0.

Type in a label name and/or use the arrow keys to select a label. Once you've selected your desired label, hit the return key to load it. Quicksilver fans may recognize and appreciate the interaction style. We've also added a few more g keyboard shortcuts to make getting around easier, refer to the complete list.

Some other changes and bug fixes we've made recently:

• You can hover over item titles in left side list to view them in a tooltip - useful when longer titles are cropped.
• The "keep unread" checkbox works once again in Internet Explorer.
• Don't reset the window scroll position for some keyboard shortcuts (like scan down/up).
• Improved sorting and filtering in the subscriptions drawer.
• Better error messages for empty and not found feeds.

Stay tuned for more fun things in the near future.

The feed generating/parsing world has had the debate about Postel's Law, as it applies to XML and feeds, several times. We are not here to weigh in on either side of the argument. Instead, we hope to provide some data so that such discussions can be made on more than philosophical grounds. Without further ado, here are the top XML errors that we have encountered when parsing all of the feeds that our users have added to Reader (and there are a lot of them):

As a whole, about seven percent of all feeds that we know about have some of these errors (this data is based on a one-day snapshot, so transient errors may be present). Note that these are all XML errors, meaning that the feed is not well-formed. We are not talking about complying with and validating against the RSS or Atom specs - that is an even higher bar than we have set here. In general, our recommendation to feed producers is to use the work that the community has put into the feed validator.

On a related note, we're aware that Reader has some issues with titles. It's great that there are test cases, and we will add this bug to our to-do list.

We've therefore come up with what we call "photo templates," which is a special display mode we have for photo sites. When it's triggered, we try our best to expand thumbnails to full-size photos. Additionally, on the right side of the screen we display a list of clickable thumbnails of other photos from that feed, so that you can cherry-pick the best ones to view. Right now we support the feeds from a few sites; here's a list of them and a sample feed from each one:

• Buzznet - sample feed
• Flickr - sample feed
• Fotki - sample feed
• smugmug - sample feed
• Textamerica.com - sample feed

This is great if you use one of these photo services, but what about other sites or self-hosted photo blogs? For now we've specifically whitelisted the above five sites for photo template support. This doesn't scale that well - there's thousands of sites and only a few overworked Reader engineers.

Our plan is to support the Media RSS extension to RSS and Atom (the thumbnail and content tags are most relevant to photo feeds). This way, if you include the right tags, Reader will be able to display your feed with the photo template without us having to do any work. The Media RSS spec is pretty thorough, and you can use Flickr's feeds as examples of usage.

FR_Queue_currentQueue.pageDown();

becomes:

t.ma()

Only people care about descriptive names like pageDown; to a computer, ma is just as good. It turns out that these compressed names will change from release to release, as we tweak the code (the more often a name is used, the shorter the compressed name that's chosen for it). Greasemonkey scripts that rely on these compressed names (like the aforementioned one) will therefore break.

So far the situation sounds pretty dire. How can more stable scripts be written? The answer turns out be quite simple. Reader has UI controls for most things that you'd want to do from a script. For example, if you want to automatically move the queue down, you can think of that as being equivalent to the user clicking the "Down" button repeatedly. Those buttons have IDs that we promise won't change without a good reason. Through JavaScript, you can simulate user clicks. Therefore, if your Greasemonkey scripts relies on them, you'll be all set. To give an example, I've written a modified version of the auto-read script that uses this method. It has code like the following (the simulateClick function is included in the script):

simulateClick(getNode("queue-down"));

I hope this helps other Greasemonkey scripts authors that are trying to tweak Reader (and other sites too).

P.S. We just pushed a new Reader release. No new features, but we have fixed a few bugs with unsubscribing and keeping things unread.

Get Google Reader scripts and more at the Userscripts.org repository. To learn more about Greasemonkey and learn how to install scripts, check out the excellent Dive Into Greasemonkey.