Google Data

Posted by Alan Green, Software Engineer

In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

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

Like always, the new Google Reader will be a great place to read and share your feeds. And in addition to Google+, you’ll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To. We’re looking forward to launching the new features very soon.

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Today we’re excited to announce some updates to the official Google Reader app for Android. Over the last couple of months, we’ve added some of your most-requested features:

• Unread count widget – choose any feed, label, person, or “all items” and get the unread count on your home screen. Clicking on the widget takes you to straight to that stream.
• News ticker widget – if you prefer a bit more information, you can add a larger size widget that cycles through items on any stream you want in Reader. Clicking any headline will take you to the article, while clicking the folder will take you to that stream.

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• Mark previous as read – if you’ve used the mobile version of Reader before and missed this feature, it’s now back! As you scroll down your reading list, hit “Mark previous as read” at any time to only mark things above the screen as read.

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In addition to these new features, thanks to 20%-ers Alexey Retunski and Anton Vayvod’s support, we now have an official Russian translation as well.

We hope you enjoy the updates – give it a try! You can download the app in all countries from the Android Market. The Google Reader app is available for devices running Android 1.6 or higher, with widget functionality available for devices on Android 2.2+.

Posted by Arif Siddiquee, Software Engineer

As some of you have noticed, we’ve recently enhanced Reader’s commenting abilities, via an “Options” menu that is present for all conversations about shared items. You can now get a link to the equivalent co…

As some of you have noticed, we’ve recently enhanced Reader’s commenting abilities, via an “Options” menu that is present for all conversations about shared items. You can now get a link to the equivalent conversation in Google Buzz, which is handy for…

Posted by Peter Baldwin, Software Engineer

It’s been a long time coming, but the official Google Reader app for Android is finally here. Let’s jump into the features, shall we?

The app supports all the basics you’d expect like unread counts, friends, sharing, liking, and starring, but it also has a whole lot more, including:

• Multiple accounts
• Synced preferences
• Full subscription features (subscribe and search from your phone)
• Search

A couple harder to discover features we’d like to highlight:

• Volume-key navigation: if you enable this in the settings, you can navigate by using your phone’s volume keys for next and previous
• Long-press on a folder or subscription to bring up a contextual menu that lets you rename, unsubscribe or change folders
• If you hit the menu key on an individual item, you can use the “send” feature which integrates with other apps on your phone to send the item using any 3rd party app

We’re really excited to make the first version of the app available today, and we hope you’ll try it out and let us know what you think on Twitter or our help forums.

Update: Here’s a link to the app on Android Market. It should run on Donut and higher.

It’s been a long time coming, but the official Google Reader app for Android is finally here. Let’s jump into the features, shall we?

The app supports all the basics you’d expect like unread counts, friends, sharing, liking, and starring, but it…

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Google Apps recently launched an improvement that made dozens of exciting Google services available to Google Apps users for the first time. As part of this launch, Google Reader is now available to our Google Apps users for free with their Apps accounts.

Google Apps is Google’s suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration apps used by over 30 million users in small businesses, large enterprises, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world. If your organization hasn’t gone Google yet you can learn more about how to lower IT costs and improve productivity and collaboration at google.com/apps.

For those Reader users who have a Google Apps account, if your administrator has already transitioned your organization to the new infrastructure, you can now use Google Reader by signing into Reader as normal with your existing Apps account.

For more details, read the complete post on the Google Enterprise blog and follow all the updates on other newly available services for Google Apps users.

Google Apps recently launched an improvement that made dozens of exciting Google services available to Google Apps users for the first time. As part of this launch, Google Reader is now available to our Google Apps users for free with their Apps accoun…

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

As of September 30th, we’ll be turning off track changes in Reader. While this isn’t a widely used feature, we wanted to let you know in advance so you can set up a suitable alternative (such as http://page2rss.com). Your previous updates will not go away, but you will stop receiving new updates from any custom feeds you have set up.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes — and as always, please feel free to visit our help forum if you have any questions.

Update: You can use the Page2RSS transition tool to convert your feeds here: http://grtransition.page2rss.com/

As of September 30th, we’ll be turning off track changes in Reader. While this isn’t a widely used feature, we wanted to let you know in advance so you can set up a suitable alternative (such as http://page2rss.com). Your previous updates will not …

The Reader team was saddened to hear that Bloglines will be shutting its doors on October 1. Bloglines was a pioneer in the feed reading space, and for Web 2.0 in general.

We know that nothing will be quite like Bloglines in the hearts of its users, b…

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

The Reader team was saddened to hear that Bloglines will be shutting its doors on October 1. Bloglines was a pioneer in the feed reading space, and for Web 2.0 in general.

We know that nothing will be quit…

As Google Reader is all about reading, we thought we should give our users a chance to maximize their screen space whenever possible… thus fullscreen mode was born. You can toggle the fullscreen mode through the ‘f’ key. Additionally, you can use ‘sh…

Posted by Arif Siddiquee, Software Engineer

As Google Reader is all about reading, we thought we should give our users a chance to maximize their screen space whenever possible… thus fullscreen mode was born. You can toggle the fullscreen mode throu…