Google Reader's Social Evolution



For more than a year, Google Reader has been struggling to add social features and almost all the new features were contrived, difficult to use and only cluttered the interface.

Originally, Google Reader's only social feature was sharing items in a public page. The trouble was that the shared page was difficult to find and users had to email the URL to their friends. Then Google Reader decided to automatically add your shared items to the reading list of your Google Talk friends, but those people weren't necessarily your friends and some were even added automatically by Gmail if you communicated often. Eight months later, Google Reader started to let you create a custom friend list.

Sharing an item wasn't enough as users couldn't explain why the post was interesting. To make things more complicated, Google Reader added "share with note". "Use the "Share with note" button on the item toolbar to create a copy of that item with your own note attached to it," explained Jenna Bilotta.


Sometimes the annotations were debatable and you wanted to post a reply, but Google Reader didn't have a commenting feature. Then comments came up and you could comment "on any items that you share or that have been shared by your friends". And since the interface wasn't complicated enough, Google Reader added a comment view to keep track of the posts that have comments.

The most recent additions help you find other people who use Google Reader. For the first time, you can protect your shared items by only making them available to the people from your friends list. You can also use Google's public profile search to find other people who share items and to follow them.


In addition to starring, sharing and sharing with note, Google Reader users can "like" posts. Why would you like a post when you can star it? By default, the starred items are private, while the items you like are public. Google Reader displays the number of likes next to each post and a list of the people who liked the post.


Google Reader became more difficult to use as the new features cluttered the interface and forced you to make more decisions. Now you have to decide if you want to star an item or just "like" it, if you want to share an item or share it with a note, if you want to follow the people who are following you.

FriendFeed, a service that helps you share and discuss interesting web pages, solved Google Reader's problems without complicating the interface. If your FriendFeed page is public, all your actions are visible to your subscribers. When you "like" an item, you automatically share it and you can also add a note. Unlike Google Reader, the note is actually the first comment from a discussion. User actions help FriendFeed find interesting posts, which are promoted at the top of the page.

Google Calendar Labs

Moving the innovation from the main product to a gallery of experimental features was a great idea for Gmail. The number of features increased rapidly without cluttering the product because you could select only the features that are useful to you. The downside was that most of the Gmail Labs were in an early phase, some were buggy and had to be temporarily disabled, while others were simply removed.

The first feature that graduated from Gmail Labs and became a standard feature is Google Tasks: you'll find it below the contacts link and this time there's no option to remove it. "The idea was always that the most popular and viable Labs features would graduate and be made more readily available to all users... and that some of the less used, less viable ones would disappear forever," explains Google.

Since Gmail Labs was a success, Google decided to create a similar gallery of experimental features for Google Calendar. "We've been looking for a way to release early features to users in a quick and experimental fashion, but in a way that would let developers and customers outside of Google extend Calendar too. We've seen how successful Gmail Labs has been and decided Calendar deserved Labs too," notes the Google Apps blog.

Google Calendar Labs has only 6 experiments: an option to customize the application using a background image, a clock that shows the current time in multiple time zones, an option that lets you jump to a certain date, a countdown to the next event, schedules for shared calendars and an option to attach Google Docs documents.



If the new features don't seem very useful, developers can write OpenSocial gadgets for Google Calendar. The APIs let you interact with Google Calendar's interface: you can add events, change settings, show the events for certain dates. Almost any iGoogle gadget can be added to Google Calendar using the following URL, assuming that you don't need to edit the preferences and that there's enough space to display it:

http://www.google.com/calendar/render?gadgeturl=GADGET_XML_FILE

(where GADGET_XML_FILE is the URL of the gadget's XML file, for example: http://www.google.com/calendar/render?gadgeturl=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/wikipedia.xml)

Filter Images by Aspect Ratio and Size

Google's image search engine constantly adds new features that help you filter search results. Here's a list of some new options that aren't yet available in the user interface:

1. New ways to specify image sizes

The current interface lets you find images that are small, medium, large or extra large, but you can't find 2 MP photos. Now you can restrict results to 2 MP, 4 MP, 6 MP, 8 MP, 10 MP, 12 MP photos or larger photos:

http://images.google.com/images?q=panda&imgsz=2mp

http://images.google.com/images?q=panda&imgsz=4mp

http://images.google.com/images?q=moon&imgsz=8mp

http://images.google.com/images?q=egyptian+pyramids&imgsz=12mp

2. Aspect ratio filter

A feature that's already available in Microsoft's image search engine and it's useful to find photos that have certain shapes.

Squared photos:
http://images.google.com/images?q=panda&imgar=s

Nearly squared photos:
http://images.google.com/images?q=panda&imgar=ns

Tall photos:
http://images.google.com/images?q=tour+eiffel&imgar=t

Wide photos:
http://images.google.com/images?q=niagara&imgar=w

Panoramic photos:
http://images.google.com/images?q=niagara&imgar=xw

Wide photos related to Niagara

Picasa Web Albums Shows the Number of Views

One of the most popular features requests for Picasa Web Albums is to show the number of views. It's difficult to know if your photos are popular and the number of views is a simple way to measure popularity. Now you can find this number below each photo.

"The 'Views' metric allows you to see how many people have viewed a certain photo or video. Views from all sources are included: Picasa Web Albums, embedded photos (if applicable), image search, etc. The view count, updated every 24 hours, is located on the bottom-right of an individual photo or video and is visible to anyone who can see the content. The number of views for each photo or video dates back to June 30, 2009. All views before this date are not included," explains Google.


Picasa Web Albums started as a service that helped you share photos with your friends and family, but it gradually added features from community-oriented services like Flickr: search, tags, Creative Commons licensing, comment moderation.

The service was launched as an online extension of the popular photo organizer Picasa, but this was an important factor that limited its development: it's difficult to upload multiple photos if you don't use Picasa, there's no photo editing feature and the name isn't very attractive. In addition to the integration with Picasa, Google's service offers only 1 GB of free storage, a great semi-automatic face recognition feature, a simple way to geotag photos, embeddable slideshows and some nice keyboard shortcuts that save time when you browse through photos. How would you improve Picasa Web Albums?

Google Chrome Suggests Popular Web Pages

The developer version of Google Chrome has recently enabled the updated new tab page, which is more customizable as it lets you remove, reorder and pin thumbnails.

One of the sections from the new tab page is "Tips and suggestions", but it's empty. A recent Chromium build revealed the mystery of the blank container: Google shows popular web pages from the iGoogle gadget "What's popular". The gadget "uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader".


Suggesting web pages is not a bad idea for the new tab page, but they should be related to your browsing history. Internet Explorer 8 has a feature called "suggested sites", which can be enabled when you install the software and it monitors your browsing activity to show related web pages. Google has a "web history" service which can use Google Toolbar to track the web pages you visit, while offering a searchable browsing history, stats and recommended web pages. It's hard to find the right balance between privacy and utility, but Google has always pushed the boundaries of what's acceptable, even if it was vilified by the media.

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