Google Data

The Google Reader team has just finished releasing a new version of Reader with a bunch of small changes and tweaks that we thought you'd like to know about.

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.