Google Reader Interface

The Google Reader team announced and rolled out a new interface for Google Reader, one of the most popular feed readers.  The change brought mixed responses, although many were positive.  As you may know if you use any of Google’s other services (iGoogle, Gmail, etc.), they are working to improve the speed, customizability, and user interface (including saving screen space) on each of the services.

Google Reader Main View (Changes)

This is what the Google Reader post states: “On the Reader team, we know that the old adage “change is good” isn’t always true. Sometimes, change is just change. In this case, we hope that these decisions both improve your Reader experience today, and pave the way for additional improvements down the line. ”  In other words, there is no reversing the change(s), and you will need to adapt to them quickly, or else change feed readers (if you find the new format completely distasteful).

The New Features and Improvements

Many of the new changes aren’t as obvious at first, but if you are familiar with the service, you might appreciate them.  First of all, your friends’ items, found within the “Friends’ Shared Items” area has grown up, with its own section.  You will be able to more easily manage settings through here, as well as view images of your friends (avatars).

Space saving has also been implemented, meaning that you can collapse each of the areas of the navigation area.  Let’s say you don’t want to view the “Your Subscriptions” or “Subscriptions” boxes.  Now, you’ll be able to click the minimize button, and they’ll instantly be minimized to present an even cleaner-looking view.

Often, if you don’t view the recent posts daily, after a couple days, your unread count will quickly add up.  You now have the ability to turn off unread counts for each section of the navigation area independently.  Items with unread items will appear as bold, and unless you hover over the item, you won’t know how many unread posts there are.

Feed Bundles are collections of feeds related to select topics, and was originally added last year.  This time around, there is an expanded collection of subjects and topics, using auto feed discovery based on an algorithm that has been set up (the Google Reader team no longer manually selects feeds for each group).  Discovering and adding new feeds is easier using this feature as well as the rearranged buttons on the main page.

Other Changes

• The “Refresh” link is now at the top of each feed’s main page (listed under the title in the bar containing “Mark all as read” and “Feed settings…”) or by clicking the world “Subscriptions” in the sidebar, which will refresh all feeds.


• The “Show all / updated” controls are now in the Subscriptions options menu.


• The “Add subscription” button has been moved from the (rather hidden middle) to the prominent location at the top of the page.

Thoughts

The new interface is a welcome change (at least for me) as it brings the Mail and Reader service in line in terms of functionality and looks.  However, I also noticed that the back-end settings panels are still using the previous color scheme and rounded corners.

What does the development team mean by “additional improvements”?  It is likely that ads will be implemented to the right side of feeds when you are in individual/expanded post view, or in the sidebar in the space below subscriptions.  These changes will likely cause some disruption in the first few days, but end up being accepted much like other changes taking place - in which ads are placed in areas previously unseen.

It is welcome to see new changes and development in the web application, as translation into any language and tags/notes were recently added.

What are your thoughts of the new features and interface of Google Reader?