And I'm just starting to find it useful! :p - 'Like' robot (frɐnc)

I was going to say the same thing about FriiendFeed FOAFs. - Richard ¿digame? Walker

FOAFs on FriendFeed are actually useful, though. They come from people who those you've subscribed to have, in a sense, vetted. You can immediately see where they came from, you can hide individual sources, you can hide entire people, you can hide individual sources from all people, etc. There is no control over there. - Akiva Moskovitz

I have mostly jumped ship with google reader. I have some feeds that port into my phone app and that's about it. Can't really stand the interface.. - Jon, the Beartato of FF from Android

Jonathan, yeah I hate the UI too. I was using NetNewsWire but gave the UI a good, solid go to mess around with the social aspects. I'm going back to NWW until Google stops half-assing their way to nowhere. - Akiva Moskovitz

Hey now. I was just at Google HQ today, and met with the Reader team. They are doing a good job in my opinion. Sometimes, their philosophy is to release early and iterate, so when you do find issues, please do call them out in a way that they can help with. They're one of the good guys. - Louis Gray

Louis, it's always different when you can put a face on it (usually); I don't have that kind of opportunity, though. As for just reading feeds, Reader's good. Its popularity should attest to that. But the social stuff tacked on top of it feels, well, just tacked on top of it. This certainly doesn't mean that it can't get better or that the Reader guys aren't doing a good job. But I do feel like the social aspects of Reader simply haven't jelled yet. They're there but they feel like a side dish. - Akiva Moskovitz

It's a cool feed reader, but I'd rather follow people and GR doesn't do that part well. - Rodfather

Louis.. just as an FYI you have a LOT more push with Google than any of us common folk.. I report bugs, enhancement and feature requests and I RARELY get feedback or status updates. It's not just a Reader thing, it a general Google issue because support doesn't scale as easily as their software does!! As a user and developer it can be incredibly frustrating and painful to develop products that rely on a combination of Google Products and APIs. - Chris Myles

Interesting context, Akiva. I've put together enough of a little social group over there, that, even including yourself, as folks share things they enjoy on Google Reader, I actually pay less and less attention to the hundred or so feeds I have dumped in there. Instead I jump to the comments section, and I just check out what folks are talking about. It's far more social and entertaining than pouring over the dry old feeds that used to cycle through there for me. - Pete Delucchi

Pete, I'm not denying that one can generate a community over there. My complaints are mainly in the UI. First, comments are completely independent of everything else. Second, there is no sense of organization in the 'People You Follow' section: it's just a mass of feed entries that are in no way identified. I have no idea where a particular entry comes from so, in a lot of cases, I have to click on it to know what it is. It'd be nice if, at least, it showed that this entry came from Lifehacker and that one from Cinematical or whatever. As of right now, it's identified only by the person who shared it. What I would like to see is it blended in with my feeds so that when I'm reading a particular feed, on the left, perhaps, there would be a box that would essentially be 'ads' of friends who have also liked that entry and entries that are similar that they've liked or shared. I should write a whole post about this with some mock-ups. - Akiva Moskovitz

I've got kind of a bias against gReader, so I've stayed mostly quiet as people have talked about it. gReader has sucked all the oxygen out of the RSS feed space so there's not nearly as much innovation as should be happening there. - mikepk

Chris, I am common folk. As I've been writing about Reader and using Reader a ton for 3 years, I've gotten lucky enough to know some of the people on the team. What's often unsaid is that building at the scale of Google is very hard. Synchronizing services like Reader with things like Contacts/Chat/Gmail, etc. takes work too, so these things will sometimes take longer than we like. - Louis Gray

That said, I have tried just about all the feed readers out there. After all, I am RSS obsessed. Google Reader is the best way to read feeds fast, and share them with the world. The link blog is the killer app. Now, they are trying to turn that killer app into a community and conversation, and I think we are at the early stages of seeing what they end up with. (Speculation - not based on any inside knowledge) - Louis Gray

sort of like when they just share them in globs here, pointless - sofarsoShawn

Akiva, If you're looking at it in list view, yeah, it's hard to tell what's what. I don't know if my way of interacting with my RSS feeds, or GReader specifically is unique, but I've got the the thing overstuffed with feeds and friends. Within a day or two, there's a 1,000+ entries. I never look at it but more than 10-15 minutes a day. I just don't have time for it. So, I just keep it open on expanded view, check out the top 10-100 or so items that I can scroll through in a few minutes, and that about does it for me. - Pete Delucchi

Louis, I know some people love gReader, but I don't think it's really an application for the mainstream. Problem is, developers are a lot more reticent to develop alternate paradigms for feed reading because gReader is a) free and b) backed by the 800 lb gorilla. - mikepk

Louis, and don't forget, I've been hyping Google as the next strong contender in the social media field. Personally, and this post here reflects this opinion, I believe that all Google is missing is integration across the board. Reader with Profiles with Talk, etc. As you point out, it's tough getting synchronization across products will be tough and even if I give up on Reader now and go back to NetNewsWire, it doesn't mean I won't be cheering them on. - Akiva Moskovitz

And the thing that annoys me most of about google reader. It may seem a minor thing.... They sort items by the date which *they* read them, which to me loses a large amount of temporal context to any larger number of feeds. Long tail feeds that have any large amount of flow can get "clumped" together by as much as 2hour increments, losing a lot of information in the process. - mikepk

Pete, for me, I apply an Inbox Zero approach toward feeds as well. I don't have OCD but I can't stand seeing that I have unread entries and I don't like just marking them all read when I haven't skimmed them because I don't want to miss anything good. So, for me, and my use case, Google Reader is good for solo feed reading alone. I've added people there but it's too frustrating to keep up with their combined feed of contextless stuff. - Akiva Moskovitz

I'm a fan of Reader as a feed reader, and many of the features like Send To have really improved it for that, but the comment and sharing functionality seem pretty immature and outright confusing in some cases. If FriendFeed disappeared I'd probably just hop over to reader, but I really hope that doesn't happen until they've had a chance to improve things substantially over there. - Ken Sheppardson

me = dead-horse-abuser but, read/unread is a really poor way to deal with any significant number of feeds. - mikepk

Akiva, for me "From your 105 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 842 items" <-- of course this doesn't show how many I marked as read. Probably 10 times that, at least. - Pete Delucchi

Akiva, when you say feed of contextless stuff, do you mean their shares, like the shares I put into FriendFeed? - Louis Gray

Louis, correct. I just see a list showing me who shared it, the title, the blurb, and the date. Although I'm not sure what the date is: is it when it was shared? when it was posted? Here on FriendFeed, I see who shared it and when and where it was shared from. I would just like to know what the source is. And, well, the ability to hide all future shares from that source. - Akiva Moskovitz

What I need is something between the list view and the expanded view. An excerpted view, if you will. The list view doesn't give enough information and the expanded view gives it all. - Akiva Moskovitz

It is the date it was shared, not posted. - Mahendra (SkepticGeek)

Here I go, unabashedly pimping my wishlist for Google Reader once again: http://socialgeek.posterous.com/my-simp... - Mahendra (SkepticGeek)

Holden, about that God of FF thing... was there a vote that I'm not aware of? Isn't it a little presumptuous considering your stats? - Richard ¿digame? Walker

Is it okay for me to spam my own thread with my own blog? I hope so because here goes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! http://www.misanthropicgeek.com/2009... - Akiva Moskovitz

Hi all- I work on the Reader team and Louis pointed this thread out to me today. (sorry I missed it) I'd like to address a couple of the points all over this comment thread, (which is great by the way) First -- Chris-I wouldn't use the word 'easily' to describe scaling a service like reader ;) Second --Akiva-- You mention that you can't identify where the feed item that was shared came from, but we do show you the title, source and author on those items just like any other feed item. We simply append the sharer's name to the card. Perhaps you are Reading in list view. In which case, is your primary feedback that you'd like to see the source of the item before opening it? we've found in our research that people have much stronger ties with the friends they are following than the blog source (in this context) and would open an item that seemed boring or confusing if it was shared by a friend). It seems you have slightly different way of Reading. Which is cool. And it's good to know there's some improvement we can do there. But list view real estate is precious, and we have to make tough decisions about what we show there and what has to be shown when the item is expanded. - Jenna Bilotta

As for the higher-level point: the social layer in Reader is just starting to mature, and we've made a product decision that we are still primarily an efficient reading app. The reason why the social stuff has historically seemed separate, is because we want to preserve people's top priority, which we believe is jamming through a few thousand items a day. :) Comments and social is embedded within the normal reading experience, but we don't mess with marking them as unread with new comments because people use Google Reader as a tool for reading and learning and we didn't want to suddenly become entirely social software. So you can see those pieces on information while you are reading if they are there, but we've provided specialized views onto the social world simply because we didn't want to be interruptive to the reading process. We've purposefully made it so that the social features could be ignored (Don't follow anyone and collapse the people section) and Reader would still function as a feedreader, just as it always did. You want the social stuff "blended" with your other feeds... and that is in fact, what we do. If you were to read in all items, you would see how many of your friends liked, shared and commented on those items as you are reading normally. What we _don't_ do is mark them as unread when people take action on them after you have already read them normally (at least in all items view). We do have an issue with "share with note" that creates a duplicate of the item and attaches the note, which is probably where you are seeing most of the siloing happen. That issue is being worked on.. but it's a bit hairy.. so it's going to take some time. - Jenna Bilotta

BUT, We are here, and we listen to as many channels as we can. We are a small team that likes to launch early and often, which is why somethings might seem "unfinished" or some larger (obvious) integrations not completed yet. Please, continue this dialog and just know we are listening and working away! :) - Jenna Bilotta

Wow, Jenna, thanks for taking the time out to address this stuff. I can't even begin to tell you how far this goes in not only encouraging my hope for these new features but in bringing down the wall a little bit between you and your users. It's funny, too, that I was coming to the same conclusions in the post I just linked to. Sometimes it's more about the user's expectations than it is the software's functionality. Keep up the great work! - Akiva Moskovitz

And, I do think a Summary View has some merit. A line with some title and share information and 2-8 lines of excerpt below that, and perhaps another line below with some other information or functionality. - Akiva Moskovitz

THanks for the feedback/response, Jenna. There is much good, and also much that is unwieldy with the Google Reader interface. The hierarchical structure is the most challenging, and lack of duplicate warnings - the same feed can appear in multiple folders, the same entry appears many times if shared by multiple people, and the whole putting people into groups is pointless. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Putting people into groups would be useful if you could view by group. However, I'd like to be able to customize my own groups. - Akiva Moskovitz

Jenna: One of the things I find frustrating is the lack of read/unread status in the Comment view. When I'm viewing a feed or someone I'm following, I can can view "new items" or "all items", but when I go to Comments view, I get "Items with comments" or "All shared items"... which doesn't make sense, because I'm in *Comments* view to begin with. I'd really like to see the same choice here as with feeds: either items with *new* comments, or all items with comments. - Ken Sheppardson

Jenna, thanks! Akiva, happy that she jumped onto this thread and addressed your concerns. :) - Myrna

Jenna, thanks for listening and your comments! - Mahendra (SkepticGeek)

@akiva - summary view is sort of what we are calling "Super snippet" it's what we use in comment view and search view. There is merit to considering this type of view for regular feed reading as well, for precisely the reasons you mention. - Jenna Bilotta

@Aaman - The same feed possibly appearing in multiple folders is a feature (if you can believe it). it's best to think of Reader folders like Gmail labels or tags. the folder name can apply to individual items, whole feeds or feeds can appear in multiple folders. This is something that is embedded in Google philosopy (we call it "Multi-inclusion") because it gives people the most flexible way to organize, should they choose to. WRT to the duplicate shares, this is happening because of the way we had previously implemented "share with note" which we are working on right now.. and hopefully address the duplicate issues. - Jenna Bilotta

@Ken - When you click on "expand this item" in comment view, it marks the item in your normal feed view as read, but doesn't otherwise. Comment view is optimized for conversations, not items, so we only show it in order of most recent comment. Your feedback makes sense though, and I'll note it for when we update comment view. Thanks! - Jenna Bilotta

Whew! Alright folks, I'm off to sleep now. Keep the feedback coming if you like, or join the "Google Reader" friendfeed group, which I track closely. (so I don't miss more threads like this.) You can find it here: http://friendfeed.com/google-... - Jenna Bilotta

Jenna: I actually never noticed the "Expand this item" link in the comment view... with lots of text links all over the place (vs buttons) I tend to get lost sometimes and can't distinguish between links that are part of Reader and what's part of the item. I appreciate seeing comments in reverse chron, but in "j"ing through the list of items, I have a hard time recognizing which comments I've read and which I haven't. - Ken Sheppardson

Main missing item: a My Discussion view, where one can see all items commented and liked. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

@Louis, I certainly understand the complexity issues and the time it takes to integrate them all. I'm certainly not complaining about Reader, I use it, Love it and "sell it" to all of my friends, the additional social features make it even more interesting. Developing products that use the APIs and Products is where it becomes difficult. I also think you have more pull then you realize, I certainly would never be invited into Google for a chat!! - Chris Myles

@Jenna I certainly wasn't trying to describe the software scaling issues as easy, but Google has obviously nailed it, Reader, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, Maps, Earth etc. What Google hasn't nailed is the support to those millions of users. The customer support forums are full of unsatisfied users who are trying to get *any* answer/feedback from Google, but support and customer expectations don't scale like your software!! It's even harder when you are a developer; Would you develop a solution using critical path APIs and products without timing, feedback or support? FYI not to pick on Reader, but I have posted 8 items to the group since last November and have never received a comment back.. http://groups.google.com/groups... (but that seems common around Google). ps. I would LOVE the opportunity to chat (email is fine)!! - Chris Myles

@Jenna BTW I'm not trying to pick on Google, I think customer support is a VERY difficult problem, especially with the number of users you have and the way Google products are compartmentalized. I have spent literally 100's of hours documenting bugs and feature/enhancement requests (in forums, groups and direct emails with PMs), but most of the time it seems like a complete waste of effort, considering I can get a guaranteed return by developing new features and/or supporting my customers. - Chris Myles

I can't stand that Google Reader displays the feeds I subscribe to in a stream. I much prefer the boxes as offered by services like Netvibes. If Google would ever change their UI to something like that, I'd probably switch in a second. - Miriam

"We do have an issue with "share with note" that creates a duplicate of the item and attaches the note, which is probably where you are seeing most of the siloing happen. That issue is being worked on.. but it's a bit hairy.. so it's going to take some time." <- Jenna, is this still going on? - Marcos Marado