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 build up groups. There does not seem to be an easy way to get my friends back and to get them into a reader feed. I apparently have to look at my G+ feed if a friend sends me an item. I do not seem to have any convenient way to filter out those useful posts from all the spam of G+.
I had easy access to search a list of things that I had found interesting over the years, and now, I guess I'm going to have to find another program to even look at that. I do appreciate that it was not outright destroyed, so thanks for that kindness.
Visually, I'm baffled. Apparently, grey and slightly darker grey are now visually effective colors for distinguishing things. I can, of course, adjust to this but overall it does not instill me with confidence.
I am, obviously, now looking for a way back to what I had this morning. If someone figures that out, I'll thank them. If it's something that needs support, I'll support it.
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.)
Google gave out notifications about the changes in Reader (including taking away social functions).
You can still download everything you had before and it wouldn't be much work to put all those followers/followees(?) into a circle and share with just them. Although I do agree that should have been done automatically.
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 layer of social that one takes for granted in almost any app. I get why they took it out (they think they're helping G+), but it doesn't work for me.)
We are working on startup: http://intigi.com. You can subscribe to your RSS or Twitter feeds and then filter the feeds by your interests (i.e., using keywords).
In terms of social features, you can make any interest public and share it with others. You can also follow or fork any of the public interests (like Github).
We are in early stages with the social features (and overall product) and would really appreciate any feedback/input! You can email me at [email protected] or use the feedback button throughout the site.
I can't agree more. At least they allow us to download our data as JSON file. I used the sharing feature a lot. I just downloaded my shared-items.json file and it is 56.3MB large!
I already tried Tiny Tiny RSS and NewsBlur but I don't really like them. There's rssLounge left, I'll try it tomorrow if I have enough time. Does anyone knows another one of these opensource webapp feed aggragator?
For now, I'll continue sharing using icebraining tips (to create a tag).
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...
I'm happy with Netvibes. It has a widget view like iGoogle and a Reader view like Google Reader. I find the latter to be better now. It integrates with Facebook and Twitter, if it's the kind of social stuff you want. It won't push what others like to you, however. That's what Twitter is for.
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".
My biggest complaint is they tampered with the scroll bar. It's way too small now and only functions as an aesthetic touch... The regular scroll bar works perfectly fine.
That was my exact reaction -- barely usable on my 1280x800 screen. Until there's a better user style out there, this css makes the theme much better for me, by hiding the search bar and the feed toolbar:
I was going to say the same thing. I took a screenshot and looked at the space. The actual content uses about 80% of the width and 70% of the height of my screen. Ideally, they could've moved a lot of stuff to the sidebar to avoid the four bars you also mention.
From 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. Perhaps the transition could have been smoother, but I cannot really see how the old system was superior in any way except for a very tiny amount of traction.
I voiced some of my concerns in the other HN submission which I will repeat here:
The old system had flaws but it worked. Firstly, I'm not against G+ integration if it meant both products were improved. However, this change looks to me like forcing a whole lot of Reader users to begrudgingly use G+. Reader's social features were not improved; only removed other than a "share to G+".
Not replacing the following system with an interface into G+ so that you can view and comment on friends' submissions from Reader is annoying. Reader was my social network. Why are they forcing me to go open G+ in a new tab everyday to see if my friends had shared anything? That's the _very_ reason I use a feed aggregator. Google doesn't provide any way to view streams in Reader (to my knowledge. I would really love to be wrong here); the only way is probably to use a third party method with no guarantee to not break every time Google touches the G+ code.
Edit: additionally, when viewing shared items on Reader, Reader tries to get the article or picture in. Now, not only do you have to go to G+, it only gives you a link rather than try to fit the article or picture onto the post. Irritating.
- 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.
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.
Woah. I kept looking for this share button you were talking about - I completely blanked on the actual Google header bar, which at this point I've mentally "edited out" on Google sites. My first thought was that that button would do something stupid - that it would share "Google Reader", not the currently viewed post.
My problem with the new Reader is the lack of visual indication of read vs unread items.
Back in 2007 I built a social RSS reader called Feed Each Other (http://feedeachother.com). It was actually pretty good, but I had to give up on it because I ran out of money, Google Reader was slowly stealing all my features, and I found it very hard to convince people to switch from GR.
It had stuff like:
- "Circles" aka, letting you group your contacts however you like and see what each group shared with you and share stuff with all your contacts or just certain groups.
- Feed and user discovery and recommendations. "People who read X also read:" and "Look who subscribes to this feed" type of thing.
- Keyboard shortcuts, auto discovery, opml import/export etc. All the usual feed reader stuff.
I've been looking for something similar to what you're describing (and hoping to stay away from Google & Facebook). However, before you turn your site back again, are there any other smaller fish out there already filling your niche?
The new design is definitely cleaner and consistent with other Google products, but it is not a design focused on providing a great reading experience (as the product name "Reader" suggests). It is basically the Gmail layout and interaction model, just different content. I wish Google had taken an approach that deeply focused on the content first (as Flipboard does).
KEEPING IN MIND that I generally hate people who whine every time every thing changes,
as someone who is fairly invested in Google Reader, it pains me that this has been a UI step backwards.
It's lot less usable; defaulting every link to black, like the rest of the interface, makes scanning for links really painful, and there's still a good 130px of useless interface chrome that is taking up space for no good reason.
Blargh! Looks like I'm going to be loading some custom stylesheets very soon.
It looks cleaner, but overall it's less readable. The old Google Reader featured distinct boxes for each news article. But now Google got rid of this so the articles all sort of glue together and the only way to distinguish articles is by the focus effect and the headings.
Also I'm not sure what prompted Google to move the star button from the left of the heading to the right. Titles are variable-length so it doesn't make sense to put a frequently used UI element in a position where it would constantly change..
This thing has an acre of useless interface and padding. With the rise of instapaper, safari reader, reeder, readability, etc, how did they possibly think more clutter was the right direction to go.
I really think Google makes decisions like this: "The data says the search bar is only used occasionally. Okay, so that means it needs to be bigger so more people use it." Search in a reader is fine, but it needs to be about as prominent as
"search this page" is in a browser.
It's crazy to me the amount of grousing about the Google Reader cheese-moving. The old system was an opaque, user-antagonistic, hacked-on mess.
The new system (integration with +) is rational and a superset of the old system, as far as I can tell.
I also choose to consider this as a precursor to many rational changes/extensions to Google Reader.
Let me be clear: I am sooo glad that I can finally direct Google Reader shared items to specific groups, so I don't have to spam everyone who follows me with every single item, which pretty much guaranteed that 80% of my feed was irrelevant/stupid/boring to any given person.
Now all I need are public, topical feeds that are subscribable/discoverable. RSS, in other words.
I hope there is enough contrast between unread and read items. It took me a while to get used to the gmail overhaul with their new design.
But integration with plus is definitely a welcome change. More often than not, I've decided against sharing simply because it's inappropriate to everyone following me.
Sigh. I like the redesign (it's about time!) but I hate that they're turning off sharing. I use that to run my link blog, and now I'll have to figure out another workaround.
Well, you can create a new Tag, then go to "Details and Statistics" in the arrow right next to the Tag and get the feed URL for it. Then you can import that to your blog, and every item you put in that Tag will appear.
Notice that about a third of it is used up by various chrome.
Now, I realize that every Google employee is issued two wall-sized hi-res screens the moment they step up to their desk, and quickly forgets what it was like to work using mere 21st-century technology. And if they ever use a laptop, it is always a sleek Chromebook which shows you a full-screen view of the web and a tiny, exquisitely designed window titlebar in a tasteful shade of blue.
But for those of us still stuck outside the bubble, it sure would be nice to have a way to collapse some of that whitespace....
I liked the search by shared items. Thankfully I always star and share, therefore I can still search (Google +1's search is pathetic, as it is non-existent).
Still wish they'd give +1 a search tool, and make all the previously shared items shared on Google+. But then again, this is power-user wishlist, and Google has been moving away from us.
This is not so bad for Google+, as it has an API, but it is terrible for Google Reader, as it still doesn't have an API. Guess this[1] issue was not starred enough on Google Code...
I don't know why tristan_louis' comment is dead, but they bring up very good point, far more egregious than either the social sharing changes or the design and screen real estate issues:
The first thing that struck me is how much slower this reader is. There seems to be a refresh on every new move forward, which was less noticeable on the previous version, if at all. There also seems to be a substantially slower response time, on the order of a couple of seconds.
Reader is now painful to use, imo. I'm constantly waiting for it to catch up to my actions.
Problem: Can no longer access old "notes" or "shared items"
Solution: Turn them into "starred items"
Details: You can only access notes or shared items from certain mobile or desktop clients. I don't know exactly which ones but the one I used was MobileRSS (iOS). Go into the "notes" folder and manually star every item (you don't need to star "shared" items because all of them are notes, but not all notes are shared items). If you want them in chronological order, you'll need to start with the oldest first, the second oldest second, etc. It took me less than 10 minutes to star my 131 items.
If you don't do this, you can't view or search for anything in "notes" or "shared items." However, you CAN view and CAN search them so long as they are starred items.
So far as I know, there is no longer a way to get content into Google Reader via the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet. It is no longer supported. This means that any site without an RSS feed cannot have any pages brought into Google Reader, so far as I can tell.
I wonder if there is a service that turns a site into an RSS feed on the fly? Then you'd be able to subscribe temporarily and star the item. Probably not convenient enough to use as a read it later (or archive in Google Reader) service, as I've been doing for the past couple years.
I've found that the easiest way to search for archive-worth web pages I've read years ago is to search my stash in Google Reader. Using a search engine doesn't always find old stuff which may be buried in search results or no longer on the web.
Google Reader circa yesterday provided an inbox-style interface for all of your content. A feed had read and unread items, and folders allowed you to compose macro-inboxes, and (this is the change) shared content was treated in the same way, if not better—new comments on this content would be clearly indicated, allowing for in-app discussions.
Today, Google Reader has made shared content a second-class feed. With the removal of the inbox-style interface, if you miss a friend's shared item on Google Plus (possibly buried in other items), it's gone. The closest you can come to a 'mark as unread' functionality is through a work-around: creating a memberless 'save for later' circle, to share items with. Furthermore, shared content isn't even visible within Google Reader.
I can't be alone in thinking this was a good interface for sharing articles. If anybody has an alternative RSS reader with this functionality, please let me know. I would pay for this, but I can see it being a tough sell generally.
Conesus, I think you've mentioned in a different thread that you have social features in the pipeline: is this something you're aiming at?
Overall, with the minimalistic Greasmonkey script, it's not bad. One thing that I don't like is that in expanded view, there is no visual indication to differentiate read from unread items. In list view, read items are grey. Why didn't they do something similar in expanded view? I keep having to look over at the unread count on the left.
[+] [-] rudyfink|14 years ago|reply
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 build up groups. There does not seem to be an easy way to get my friends back and to get them into a reader feed. I apparently have to look at my G+ feed if a friend sends me an item. I do not seem to have any convenient way to filter out those useful posts from all the spam of G+.
I had easy access to search a list of things that I had found interesting over the years, and now, I guess I'm going to have to find another program to even look at that. I do appreciate that it was not outright destroyed, so thanks for that kindness.
Visually, I'm baffled. Apparently, grey and slightly darker grey are now visually effective colors for distinguishing things. I can, of course, adjust to this but overall it does not instill me with confidence.
I am, obviously, now looking for a way back to what I had this morning. If someone figures that out, I'll thank them. If it's something that needs support, I'll support it.
[+] [-] toyg|14 years ago|reply
Google -1 on this one.
(and yeah, the new grey-on-grey style is really bad and depressing.)
[+] [-] antichaos|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyclif|14 years ago|reply
That's just classic Edward Tufte design aesthetics.
[+] [-] omnibot|14 years ago|reply
You can still download everything you had before and it wouldn't be much work to put all those followers/followees(?) into a circle and share with just them. Although I do agree that should have been done automatically.
[+] [-] thesethings|14 years ago|reply
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 layer of social that one takes for granted in almost any app. I get why they took it out (they think they're helping G+), but it doesn't work for me.)
[+] [-] mjfern|14 years ago|reply
In terms of social features, you can make any interest public and share it with others. You can also follow or fork any of the public interests (like Github).
We are in early stages with the social features (and overall product) and would really appreciate any feedback/input! You can email me at [email protected] or use the feedback button throughout the site.
Thanks in advance!
[+] [-] p4bl0|14 years ago|reply
I already tried Tiny Tiny RSS and NewsBlur but I don't really like them. There's rssLounge left, I'll try it tomorrow if I have enough time. Does anyone knows another one of these opensource webapp feed aggragator?
For now, I'll continue sharing using icebraining tips (to create a tag).
[+] [-] gchucky|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorog|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ambirex|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] edderly|14 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] oldstrangers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wvl|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vladimirm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Kylekramer|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rfvtgb|14 years ago|reply
The old system had flaws but it worked. Firstly, I'm not against G+ integration if it meant both products were improved. However, this change looks to me like forcing a whole lot of Reader users to begrudgingly use G+. Reader's social features were not improved; only removed other than a "share to G+".
Not replacing the following system with an interface into G+ so that you can view and comment on friends' submissions from Reader is annoying. Reader was my social network. Why are they forcing me to go open G+ in a new tab everyday to see if my friends had shared anything? That's the _very_ reason I use a feed aggregator. Google doesn't provide any way to view streams in Reader (to my knowledge. I would really love to be wrong here); the only way is probably to use a third party method with no guarantee to not break every time Google touches the G+ code.
Edit: additionally, when viewing shared items on Reader, Reader tries to get the article or picture in. Now, not only do you have to go to G+, it only gives you a link rather than try to fit the article or picture onto the post. Irritating.
[+] [-] lukasb|14 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] est|14 years ago|reply
Not sure how G+ handle this, but when multiple people share the same article, it will often show only once in Shared Items.
[+] [-] tomkarlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] barrkel|14 years ago|reply
My problem with the new Reader is the lack of visual indication of read vs unread items.
[+] [-] efraim|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akent|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesethings|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] udfalkso|14 years ago|reply
It had stuff like:
- "Circles" aka, letting you group your contacts however you like and see what each group shared with you and share stuff with all your contacts or just certain groups.
- Feed and user discovery and recommendations. "People who read X also read:" and "Look who subscribes to this feed" type of thing.
- Keyboard shortcuts, auto discovery, opml import/export etc. All the usual feed reader stuff.
Check out this old intro video I made for it (social/interesting parts start around 1:40). The design in the video is out-dated though, it ended up looking like this, http://feedeachother.com/screenshot_500.png. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Ltwh4AO_w&feature=youtu...
Maybe I should turn it back on? Any takers?
[+] [-] iskander|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KTamas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GBKS|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phillmv|14 years ago|reply
as someone who is fairly invested in Google Reader, it pains me that this has been a UI step backwards.
It's lot less usable; defaulting every link to black, like the rest of the interface, makes scanning for links really painful, and there's still a good 130px of useless interface chrome that is taking up space for no good reason.
Blargh! Looks like I'm going to be loading some custom stylesheets very soon.
[+] [-] atarian|14 years ago|reply
Also I'm not sure what prompted Google to move the star button from the left of the heading to the right. Titles are variable-length so it doesn't make sense to put a frequently used UI element in a position where it would constantly change..
[+] [-] jcampbell1|14 years ago|reply
I really think Google makes decisions like this: "The data says the search bar is only used occasionally. Okay, so that means it needs to be bigger so more people use it." Search in a reader is fine, but it needs to be about as prominent as "search this page" is in a browser.
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
Someone wrote an AppEngine service [1] to transcode Google+ to RSS, but they shut it down after Google raised the AppEngine feeds.
[1] http://www.ghacks.net/2011/07/13/google-plus-rss-feeds/
[+] [-] joebadmo|14 years ago|reply
The new system (integration with +) is rational and a superset of the old system, as far as I can tell.
I also choose to consider this as a precursor to many rational changes/extensions to Google Reader.
Let me be clear: I am sooo glad that I can finally direct Google Reader shared items to specific groups, so I don't have to spam everyone who follows me with every single item, which pretty much guaranteed that 80% of my feed was irrelevant/stupid/boring to any given person.
Now all I need are public, topical feeds that are subscribable/discoverable. RSS, in other words.
[+] [-] amjith|14 years ago|reply
But integration with plus is definitely a welcome change. More often than not, I've decided against sharing simply because it's inappropriate to everyone following me.
[+] [-] squealingrat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hosh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monty_singh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efraim|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vilhelm_s|14 years ago|reply
here is what my screen looks like after the redesign: http://imgur.com/ppg4o
Notice that about a third of it is used up by various chrome.
Now, I realize that every Google employee is issued two wall-sized hi-res screens the moment they step up to their desk, and quickly forgets what it was like to work using mere 21st-century technology. And if they ever use a laptop, it is always a sleek Chromebook which shows you a full-screen view of the web and a tiny, exquisitely designed window titlebar in a tasteful shade of blue.
But for those of us still stuck outside the bubble, it sure would be nice to have a way to collapse some of that whitespace....
[+] [-] thewordis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielRibeiro|14 years ago|reply
Still wish they'd give +1 a search tool, and make all the previously shared items shared on Google+. But then again, this is power-user wishlist, and Google has been moving away from us.
This is not so bad for Google+, as it has an API, but it is terrible for Google Reader, as it still doesn't have an API. Guess this[1] issue was not starred enough on Google Code...
[1] http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=29
[+] [-] wvl|14 years ago|reply
The first thing that struck me is how much slower this reader is. There seems to be a refresh on every new move forward, which was less noticeable on the previous version, if at all. There also seems to be a substantially slower response time, on the order of a couple of seconds.
Reader is now painful to use, imo. I'm constantly waiting for it to catch up to my actions.
[+] [-] FilterJoe|14 years ago|reply
Solution: Turn them into "starred items"
Details: You can only access notes or shared items from certain mobile or desktop clients. I don't know exactly which ones but the one I used was MobileRSS (iOS). Go into the "notes" folder and manually star every item (you don't need to star "shared" items because all of them are notes, but not all notes are shared items). If you want them in chronological order, you'll need to start with the oldest first, the second oldest second, etc. It took me less than 10 minutes to star my 131 items.
If you don't do this, you can't view or search for anything in "notes" or "shared items." However, you CAN view and CAN search them so long as they are starred items.
So far as I know, there is no longer a way to get content into Google Reader via the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet. It is no longer supported. This means that any site without an RSS feed cannot have any pages brought into Google Reader, so far as I can tell.
I wonder if there is a service that turns a site into an RSS feed on the fly? Then you'd be able to subscribe temporarily and star the item. Probably not convenient enough to use as a read it later (or archive in Google Reader) service, as I've been doing for the past couple years.
I've found that the easiest way to search for archive-worth web pages I've read years ago is to search my stash in Google Reader. Using a search engine doesn't always find old stuff which may be buried in search results or no longer on the web.
[+] [-] neonkiwi|14 years ago|reply
Today, Google Reader has made shared content a second-class feed. With the removal of the inbox-style interface, if you miss a friend's shared item on Google Plus (possibly buried in other items), it's gone. The closest you can come to a 'mark as unread' functionality is through a work-around: creating a memberless 'save for later' circle, to share items with. Furthermore, shared content isn't even visible within Google Reader.
I can't be alone in thinking this was a good interface for sharing articles. If anybody has an alternative RSS reader with this functionality, please let me know. I would pay for this, but I can see it being a tough sell generally.
Conesus, I think you've mentioned in a different thread that you have social features in the pipeline: is this something you're aiming at?
[+] [-] GraemeL|14 years ago|reply