Does using Reader now imply a membership in Google+? I am not interested in G+ but I would like to continue using Reader.
Not necessarily. You can use Reader now to read documents, but sharing is done through email, or pushed to G+.
New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#82From all the outrage, I'll learn that users will love (or perhaps just grow accustom to) an utterly broken and opaque system as long as it is left around to grow a community. If you used Google Reader's social features before, you impress the hell out of me. I never grokked a single element of it after many years of use. I think Google clearly needed to do something, and integration with G+ is an obvious move. Perhap…
Ways in which the old system was superior: - You interacted with that subset of your friends (and their friends) that cared enough about reading to use this weird software. - You could read your hand-selected feeds, share items and read others' shares in the same place. It was social reading. Now the reading and the social aspect are divorced.
Seems like the first complaint is actually an improvement in the new version. You lose the reading focused only culture, but you gain the ability to have even better granularity. You can share stories with your sports buddies, work relevant info with your coworkers, local stuff with people in your area. Before, you were limited to a very niche group. Now, you can share with people who never even heard of Google Reader or RSS. And if you wanted, you could make an old Google Reader power readers circle. I think that is a fair trade off when you are talking about a Google scale application; I think this the main point everyone is missing, you aren't the typical user. If you were, Google Reader would be mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook.
Divorcing the social aspect from the RSS reader makes sense. Social reading should be a subset of Google+, not a layer on top of Google Reader. Google should improve the reading articles aspect of Google+ (Sparks or whatever seemed DOA), yes, but the overarching concept is very sound.
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#83The no-sharing/discovery thing has hit me hard. If anybody out there has a social RSS reader start-up, feel free to reply to this and advertise your service. I will drag my friends to it along with me. (Yes, I use Twitter, Instapaper, news aggregate sites, etc. Yes social software has changed how i would otherwise discover links/news. But I still need an RSS reader, and the passive sharing in old Google Reader is a l…
I just read an article (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/10/sharebros-...) about a service called Hivemined that some people are currently putting together. I'm hoping that since the impetus for building this new service is the destruction of Reader, it will actually be a worthy replacement. Fingers crossed...
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#84I had a shot at redesigning the page to make better use of space and condense down the many, many toolbars.
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#85One early criticism (aside from the sharing bugaboo) is the header is larger making the allowable reading area much smaller. the topmost the feed content can be read is ~193px from the top of the browser. And you can't scroll down because of the way the page it built. Here is what firebug told me: 29px - account bar 59px - search bar 73px - feed toolbar 32px - feed title bar (in the reading pane)
More bars than Dublin...I agree, the waste of space is annoying. I can't even think of the last time I wanted to search my RSS feeds and it's taking up a chunk of space. On a 13inch Macbook add the Mac App bar, Chrome (tabs + search-url + bookmarks toolbar) a third of the readable area is covered with "bars".
I am very annoyed at the waste of space, waiting for a new Google Reader Absolutely Compact extension for Opera. That said, I frequently search my RSS feeds.
To my surprise, there's often lots of very informing stuff on economic/political questions I might search about; it's like consulting my own private network of expert commentary, and is often more useful to me than google search.
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#86From all the outrage, I'll learn that users will love (or perhaps just grow accustom to) an utterly broken and opaque system as long as it is left around to grow a community. If you used Google Reader's social features before, you impress the hell out of me. I never grokked a single element of it after many years of use. I think Google clearly needed to do something, and integration with G+ is an obvious move. Perhap…
Agreed. I've used Reader for years and I out of the 500+ people I'm usually connected to on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, I think all of 10 were on Reader. Just not enough to make sharing there worthwhile.
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#87Took me a while to realise that you had to click the share button in the far top right to share the currently viewed item. The physical separation between the item you're sharing and the screen element you have to click to share it strikes me as rather counter-intuitive.
Anyone found the new keyboard shortcut for "share"? It used to be Shift-S, apparently no longer works.
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#88A few thoughts after a some use: I was part of a community of people I liked, and now, after I clicked a button, that was gone. I miss those people already. I don't recall anything on the text that clearly said "oh yeah, stuff will be gone, including your friends, and we meant to do that." If I want to share now, I have to do so publicly with the Internet or click a "share" button way in the upper right and then buil…
I don't know why they just didn't try to automatically convert the Readers categories of users into G+ circles, plus a button "not on G+? click here and join". Google -1 on this one. (and yeah, the new grey-on-grey style is really bad and depressing.)
I don't understand either. I fully expected them to add a new circle for me called "Google Reader Friends" or something but they didn't. Even better would've been in that popup saying hey look, something new! to give the option of creating that very circle. Very big and obvious oversight.
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#89From all the outrage, I'll learn that users will love (or perhaps just grow accustom to) an utterly broken and opaque system as long as it is left around to grow a community. If you used Google Reader's social features before, you impress the hell out of me. I never grokked a single element of it after many years of use. I think Google clearly needed to do something, and integration with G+ is an obvious move. Perhap…
> how the old system was superior in any way
Not sure how G+ handle this, but when multiple people share the same article, it will often show only once in Shared Items.
Re: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
#90A few thoughts after a some use: I was part of a community of people I liked, and now, after I clicked a button, that was gone. I miss those people already. I don't recall anything on the text that clearly said "oh yeah, stuff will be gone, including your friends, and we meant to do that." If I want to share now, I have to do so publicly with the Internet or click a "share" button way in the upper right and then buil…
Apparently, grey and slightly darker grey are now visually effective colors for distinguishing things
That's just classic Edward Tufte design aesthetics.