So the only way to share something privately is to first publicly +1 it?
Ah, apparently you can click "share" in the black bar at the top and it will let you directly share the currently selected item in reader with specific circles. That's not very discoverable.
I agree, that is a poor choice to have as the only way to share something. An easy fix would be to add a link on each item as a kind of synonym for the Share button in the G+ bar. That said, the problem is a pretty minor one given the extent of the redesign. I'm rather happy with the new Reader myself.
The new UI seems to waste a lot of the screen with whitespace, to the point where I feel like it is an unintended bug (this is in the 'Expanded' view)...and it seems like you can no longer resize anything on the page?
google reader was the site where i've learned the most in the internet by sharing and reading other people's comments and notes. it was a truly content based social network
I don't know. (Disclaimer: I never used Google Reader's social functions, they seemed too complicated to me)
Is having a clear focus Yahooizing? What Yahoo is doing is having tens of various and sometimes overlapping services. Google doesn't want to go this road and is cutting the services so they are clearly defined and don't overlap.
Now I have reservations about google plus (or "We can do Facebook, too!"), but that's on another post.
I totally disagree. The old social functions were totally opaque, irrational, and hard to control.
The new system allows you to share with select groups, or publicly, in a very granular way.
Just because you got used to an old, broken way of doing things doesn't mean that it was better. I can't believe the amount of collective bitching about this long-overdue overhaul.
I never used their old social features at all, but loved how easy it was to skim long lists of RSS items in the old reader. I'll probably switch to a self-hosted web rss thing or a local client instead, now.
While being able to share to particular groups is nice, this just adds a new site that I need to check everyday (ie. G+) which goes against everything a feed aggregator should be.
It would be nice if there was an interface to G+ from reader where you can share, view and comment from inside Reader.
Adding a full 20px of vertical padding to each item in a list sure looks pretty, but it's cut the number of items visible on the page by ~50%. For a tool designed for skimming large amounts of information it seems to cut efficiency rather than improve it.
Can any UI people provide a good reason for this change? (More white space = faster skimming/more comprehension?)
You assume that skimming is a primary use case. That is not how i use google reader (if there is a feed that i consistently do not want to read i unsubscribe). Maybe they were optimizing for my use case, where you read everything (or close to it).
For example, I have Hacker News in my rss feeds. I certainly never read everything or even close to that. As a fellow HN user, surely you are not interested in every article here?
Because it is a very good aggregation of almost everything on the internet I care about. I can have feeds for tumblr accounts, youtube accounts, twitter accounts and whole subreddits and without actually having an account in any one of them or actually having to go to them everyday.
This ties in with my complaint with Reader removing social features. I don't want to go to G+ everyday to see my friends' shares when previously I could stay in the only ``social'' network I care about.
Because nearly every site has an RSS/Atom feed and therefore, I can visit dozens of sites at once without ever leaving Google Reader. Not just blog posts and news sites, but anything with an RSS/Atom feed like Facebook status updates, tweets, etc. It's efficient web surfing.
The worst thing about these new designs is - they are LESS USABLE on Android tablet than before!
I wanted to write an article about how all the new interfaces (Google Groups, Google Docs, Google Translate) work LESS on Android tablet than the old ones, but I have no time for that.
Plus, I feel like I am the only person in the world with an Android tablet anyway.
Contrary to most people here, I really like the new layout. I'm trying to move to web-apps for most of my daily needs, and I specifically decided that the old Google Reader wasn't good enough.
This feels much more like a native app, rather than something that 1999 forgot. Form may not equal function, but it sure influences function.
They sacrificed usability to make a lot of GReader users use G+ begrudgingly. Now, instead of being able to see a nice feed counter for friends' shares, I would have to go to G+ in another tab to do what I was previously able to in the very same tab.
Reader integrating into G+? Why is this relationship not mutual?
Edit: And the concept of "+1" being to "give it your stamp of approval" does not exactly suit the majority of my shares...
For one, I shared a particular article called "New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing".
So I've been using this new Google Reader for a full hour now and here are a few observations.
Note that my background with Google Reader is that I read 312 feeds through it and do end my day with 0 unreads. This means that, on most month, I consume about 30,000 stories, seldom clicking away from the reader itself as I read mostly full feeds.
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. This is particularly noticeable if you read the HN firehose feed and try to "N" through the entries.
The left column is mostly OK and it does seem cleaner than the previous version.
The top is dreadful, with a new line taking about 20% of the screen real-estate. While this gives a more "airy" feeling to the Reader, this is at the cost of displaying less content on the page. This is the first glaring UI problem but it's not the worse.
For some odd reason, they seem to have decided to limit the flexibility of the content in the feeds, with text stopping at about 800 pixels and the left of the space on the right being left blank. This creates a substantial imbalance on the screen and makes the whole look feel incomplete. Furthermore, it reduces information density per entry displayed.
Starred is now a sharper edged icons, which is substantially less rounded than the previous version. The presence of 2 stars (one next to the title and one in the toolbar) makes one wonder which one should be used. That's confusing.
The absence of share is a major bummer. In my previous workflow, I would click share (1 click) when I found something interesting and move on. I had setup an RSS reader that would pick up my shared items and pass them on to Twitter, Facebook, and others. This meant that 1 click allowed me to share to social networks without leaving Google Reader. In order to reproduce the same process, I can now "Send to" a service. To do so, I first click "Send to" and then click on the appropriate service, which opens another window. In that service, I can then press a button and share things through that service. I then close that service window and click on the Google Reader tab to get back to my Reader workflow. This is a total of 5 clicks where there once was 1. Doesn't strike me as much of an improvement.
All and all, I have to say, Google Reader may be a fine upgrade for people who don't use RSS readers. But for anyone who's serious about consuming content over RSS, Google has done a substantial disservice by taking what was once a great service for power users and driving it into the ditch.
The net-net of all this is that Google Reader, a service where I spent most of my online reading time will soon end up being replaced by another RSS reader (at least one more suited to my usage) and Google will lose a substantial amount of my online time in the process. I'm sure they won't mind (or even notice) but I suspect they will be surprised when a Google Reader replacement service arises away from them and finds a dedicated following.
If for a few days I've been nervous that my free Apps account still does not have Google+, now I'm glad. Because that means, that I won't get new Google Reader, since it is useless (and probably won't work) without Google+.
Oh, wait. They could switch my reader to new version, and then it wouldn't work, because I don't have Google+. Oh. Waiting.
Or I'm just giving in to mass of people, who are not glad with the product, which is not yet shipped.
38 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 80.2 ms ] threadAh, apparently you can click "share" in the black bar at the top and it will let you directly share the currently selected item in reader with specific circles. That's not very discoverable.
Removal of sharing completely fucks up the workflow I use to send things to pinboard
http://pinboard.in/api/#posts_add
google reader was the site where i've learned the most in the internet by sharing and reading other people's comments and notes. it was a truly content based social network
it was fun
it was great
it is gone
Is having a clear focus Yahooizing? What Yahoo is doing is having tens of various and sometimes overlapping services. Google doesn't want to go this road and is cutting the services so they are clearly defined and don't overlap.
Now I have reservations about google plus (or "We can do Facebook, too!"), but that's on another post.
The new system allows you to share with select groups, or publicly, in a very granular way.
Just because you got used to an old, broken way of doing things doesn't mean that it was better. I can't believe the amount of collective bitching about this long-overdue overhaul.
It would be nice if there was an interface to G+ from reader where you can share, view and comment from inside Reader.
They were not. I've been using them (with a group of +100 people, almost of all of them "Computer Illiterate") for 4 to 5 years.
Can any UI people provide a good reason for this change? (More white space = faster skimming/more comprehension?)
This ties in with my complaint with Reader removing social features. I don't want to go to G+ everyday to see my friends' shares when previously I could stay in the only ``social'' network I care about.
I can't use this with a laptop, can I?
I wanted to write an article about how all the new interfaces (Google Groups, Google Docs, Google Translate) work LESS on Android tablet than the old ones, but I have no time for that.
Plus, I feel like I am the only person in the world with an Android tablet anyway.
Plus, I personally dislike having a separate app for every second service, when I have a browser.
In an ideal world, that would be all I need.
This isn't very useful to the average user, but I'm sure any HN reader can handle this.
This feels much more like a native app, rather than something that 1999 forgot. Form may not equal function, but it sure influences function.
Reader integrating into G+? Why is this relationship not mutual?
Edit: And the concept of "+1" being to "give it your stamp of approval" does not exactly suit the majority of my shares...
For one, I shared a particular article called "New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing".
Note that my background with Google Reader is that I read 312 feeds through it and do end my day with 0 unreads. This means that, on most month, I consume about 30,000 stories, seldom clicking away from the reader itself as I read mostly full feeds.
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. This is particularly noticeable if you read the HN firehose feed and try to "N" through the entries.
The left column is mostly OK and it does seem cleaner than the previous version.
The top is dreadful, with a new line taking about 20% of the screen real-estate. While this gives a more "airy" feeling to the Reader, this is at the cost of displaying less content on the page. This is the first glaring UI problem but it's not the worse.
For some odd reason, they seem to have decided to limit the flexibility of the content in the feeds, with text stopping at about 800 pixels and the left of the space on the right being left blank. This creates a substantial imbalance on the screen and makes the whole look feel incomplete. Furthermore, it reduces information density per entry displayed.
Starred is now a sharper edged icons, which is substantially less rounded than the previous version. The presence of 2 stars (one next to the title and one in the toolbar) makes one wonder which one should be used. That's confusing.
The absence of share is a major bummer. In my previous workflow, I would click share (1 click) when I found something interesting and move on. I had setup an RSS reader that would pick up my shared items and pass them on to Twitter, Facebook, and others. This meant that 1 click allowed me to share to social networks without leaving Google Reader. In order to reproduce the same process, I can now "Send to" a service. To do so, I first click "Send to" and then click on the appropriate service, which opens another window. In that service, I can then press a button and share things through that service. I then close that service window and click on the Google Reader tab to get back to my Reader workflow. This is a total of 5 clicks where there once was 1. Doesn't strike me as much of an improvement.
All and all, I have to say, Google Reader may be a fine upgrade for people who don't use RSS readers. But for anyone who's serious about consuming content over RSS, Google has done a substantial disservice by taking what was once a great service for power users and driving it into the ditch.
The net-net of all this is that Google Reader, a service where I spent most of my online reading time will soon end up being replaced by another RSS reader (at least one more suited to my usage) and Google will lose a substantial amount of my online time in the process. I'm sure they won't mind (or even notice) but I suspect they will be surprised when a Google Reader replacement service arises away from them and finds a dedicated following.
Oh, wait. They could switch my reader to new version, and then it wouldn't work, because I don't have Google+. Oh. Waiting.
Or I'm just giving in to mass of people, who are not glad with the product, which is not yet shipped.
Update: I have new version of Reader. And no social stuff. http://laacz.lv/tmp/oops-google-reader.png. Sweet, Google...