Comments on: A More Serious Look At Google Reader

By: John Gordon

John Gordon — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:04:16 +0000

I’d just like to see a feed for my notes, that would provide the title, URL and my note.

Then I could use twitter feed to turn each link and note into a tweet.

By: Rob Diana

Rob Diana — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:54:12 +0000

Thaddaeus

Excellent point regarding searching and filtering. I would add blog discovery in the same grouping. The searching and filtering are fairly basic and fit with the Google style. Discovery is always difficult though.

By: Thaddaeus

Thaddaeus — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:47:42 +0000

Excellent points, especially concerning contact management. Some method of granular sharing would be a brilliant feature, but I doubt that is on the near horizon, if at all.

I’d also add saved searches, or search filters to the list. Part of the reason behind following feeds is persistent interest in specific topics; such a feature would go far in enabling users to find relevant blog posts. FeedDemon (which integrates with Google Reader) has this feature, but it would be nice to have it built-in, since Gmail has that capability.

By: Rob Diana

Rob Diana — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:46:48 +0000

John

Mobile is an interesting perspective, but I think we really need to be patient on that side. Granted, you would hope that the mobile interface is updated in the same timeframes as the web UI.

By: John Bredehoft

John Bredehoft — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:36:58 +0000

There is one other issue with Google Reader. While all of the features are nice (and I’m experimenting with comments more), many of the new features, and even some of the older ones, are inaccessible from older mobile phones. For example, I use a first generation Motorola Q which has older versions of Windows Mobile and Internet Explorer, and while I am able to Share, I am unable to Share With Note. There’s no logical reason for the “Share With Note” feature to be unavailable in the mobile environment, and this really hampers my use of Google Reader (in my case, to feed items into FriendFeed). A share is often useless if you are unable to put the share into context, but in the mobile environment there’s no easy way to do that.