10 Ways to Look at Feeds

Feed Readers have many forms: most of them are independent applications, others are just plug-ins and, in some cases, reading feeds is just a feature. Feeds are a natural evolution of newsletters and of the "what's new" section of a site. Instead of writing a changelog for your site as a static page, you could write it in a feed so that people can subscribe to it and get the latest updates.


Feeds are usually associated with blogs and news sites, but they can be used for many other purposes like delivering search results (Yahoo Search, Google Blog Search), software updates or personalized content. Feed readers treat feeds in many ways:

1. Email messages
Mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Opera M2, but also Yahoo Mail Beta, treat feed items like email messages. The association makes sense if you want to replace newsletters with feeds, but if you subscribe to a lot of feeds, you might spend more time reading them than in a separate feed reader. It's also impractical to treat feeds like emails because you can't comment by replying to the post.

2. Instant messages
There are applications like Google Desktop, Anothr for Google Talk that notify you when your favorite feeds are updated. The problem with these updates is that they become annoying, especially if they are very frequent. Instant alerts are useful for breaking news or for really interesting events, not for every new post. Particls tries to solve this problem.

3. Bookmarks
When you subscribe to a feed, you also bookmark it so you can find it later. Firefox lets you subscribe to feeds using live bookmarks: instead of going to the site, you see a list of the most recent headlines. A similar concept was introduced in Google Toolbar: custom buttons. "You can add buttons to your Toolbar that will let you visit and search your favorite websites and keep up with interesting feeds." This concept works for news sites and if you have a small number of subscriptions.

4. Portals / start pages
Most services that offer personalized homepages let you subscribe to feeds: iGoogle, Netvibes, My Yahoo and others. The advantage is that you can easily have an overview of what's new for the things that are important to you. But you can't add too many feeds to a start page or it will become cluttered.

5. Newspapers
Sage, a Firefox extension, uses stylesheets to create virtual newspapers. The effect is impressive and, in many cases, the rendering from Sage looks much better than the site itself. GreatNews also has a nice newspaper view.

6. Social filters
Read feeds filtered by experts, friends, your community or recommended by an application. Google Reader lets you share your favorite posts and someone can subscribe to your feed of shared items: you become a filter in your area of expertise. Yoono provides recommendations from other users with similar interests.

7. River (of news)
All the feeds are merged in a big feed sorted chronologically. You'll read the most recent posts first, you don't have to switch from a feed to another feed, the news will be diverse. "Instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds, you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up," explained Dave Winer. Google Reader has a "river of news" view, available if you go to All Items.

8. Clusters
Connect the related posts into a conversation. There's an experimental widget from Yahoo, Sharpreader that "detects and shows connections between items if they have the same link, if one item links to another, if two items both link to the same external webpage", but there's no feed reader that offers real clustering.

9. Multimedia downloads
Subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, Miro and get all the future episodes automatically. Some BitTorrent clients (uTorrent) also support RSS feeds - the concept is called broadcatching.

10. Radars
"A newsradar is a stream of news items covering a very specific topic. A newsradar is usually created by aggregating together news feeds from a multitude of different sources covering the specific topic selected and adding to the resulting mix content items found through the use of so-called search feeds." Well, you could just use some clever search feeds from Google Blog Search or Technorati.

How do you look at your feeds and how did you choose a feed reader?

Blogroll Powered by Google Reader

Update (November 7): Google Reader implemented the feature described in this post.

Bloglines has a feature that lets you automatically create a blogroll from the feeds you've subscribed to. This way, you don't have to maintain your blogroll because it's permanently in sync with your subscriptions. "On many blogs, there are lists of links to other blogs. These lists are called blogrolls. You can incorporate your Bloglines subscriptions into your blog, as a blogroll, by including a small piece of HTML that loads a script from Bloglines."

Many people want the same feature in Google Reader, but don't know it's already available, albeit not in a transparent way. Because you don't want to include in a blogroll all your subscriptions, you could share a folder (in Google Reader, a feed can be placed in multiple folders). So how to convert all the subscriptions from a folder to a nice list that can be added to a blog?

1. You need to add all the blogs you want to share to a folder. This can be easily done from the settings: select the blogs, click on "more actions" and add them to that folder (Google Reader calls it a tag, but you should ignore that).

2. To make your subscriptions visible outside your account, the folder should become public. Go to the Tags tab from the settings and click on the small broadcasting icon next to your folder. The icon should become orange and the word "private" should be replaced by "public". In the screenshot below, cool-blogs is a public folder.



3. Copy the link for "view public page". It should look like this:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/[NUMBER]/label/[FOLDERNAME]

Then enter the link below and click on "Build".


4. Copy the code in your blog's template. In Blogger, you could paste the code in a new HTML/JavaScript element.


I've also included an option to save the blogroll as an OPML file that can be easily imported in most feed readers.

Related:
Customize Google Reader's clips

Differences Between Google and Yahoo

I stumbled upon a very interesting question at Yahoo Answers and, surprisingly, the answers were quite thought-provoking. The question was: "What is the difference between Yahoo and Google?" and here are some of my favorite answers (slightly edited):

ThisNickIsTaken: "Google has a philosophy of keeping things simple so that people who are technically challenged can use it without getting confused, Also that simple things are fast.. Yahoo believes in feature rich application.. their products are more customizable and complex."

Gags: "It's a difficult one to answer since both companies are positioned very very differently; on face value, Yahoo looks hip and colorful, whereas Google looks simple and elegant; (...) Google is more thoughtful and strategic, Yahoo is flamboyant and more reactive; Google concentrates on value added solutions rather than presentation and Yahoo concentrates on superb presentation followed by value creation."

Ravelin101: "Yahoo has tons of media and ADS (loads slower). Google search is better (faster) only text ads. I started with Yahoo since I've known it first: Mail, Photos (now Flickr), Geocities but since Google's introduction, I've been moving things to Google Mail, Photos (Picasa), Googlepages."

So Google is strongly associated with simplicity, usefulness, pages that load fast (in one word: text), while Yahoo is connected with rich interfaces, complex designs, pages that load slowly (in one word: multimedia). Gags even called Yahoo flamboyant, which means "elaborately and heavily ornamented". It will be interesting to see if the acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick will change people's perception about Google.

Related:
Defining Google collaboratively

Sticky Google Search Results

Another day, another Google experiment. Mike Grehan noticed an interesting option at the bottom of a search results page: "Know a better page for [your query]? Suggest one!". After you add a page, it will appear at the top of search results for that query. Obviously, only for you.

"Yes, you get to input the URL of a favourite page on the query subject, click the button and, of course, you're taken to your Google account to log in to your personalized search."


This might be an interesting way of bookmarking web pages: associating a query with one or more pages. Google already personalizes the results by looking at your search history and your bookmarks. Maybe Google will also use this data to improve the quality of the search results.

{ via Search Engine Land }

Change or Delete Your Homepage in Page Creator

Google Page Creator, the free tool that lets you build simple web pages without knowing HTML, has received a small update.

Until today, the only thing you couldn't delete from a web page was the homepage, but now you can delete it too. To delete an entire site, you can select all the pages and remove them. Unfortunately, you'll have to delete the uploaded files one at a time or hide the site in the settings. But even if you delete everything from the web site, there's no way to delete the site itself.

Another improvement is that any page can become a homepage, so you can have multiple potential homepages. To change the homepage, go to the settings and select one of the pages you've created from the Homepage option.


It would be nice to see more features in Google Page Creator that could make it a part of Google Docs: collaborative editing, site search, folders, custom templates.

Google's Grandiose Plans in the Mobile Space

Wall Street Journal has an article about Google's plans to win the battle for mobile advertising (find how to read this article for free).

The company, which has made billions of dollars in Web advertising on computers, is courting wireless operators to carry handsets customized to Google products, including its search engine, email and a new mobile Web browser, say people familiar with the plans. It wants to capture a big chunk of the fast-growing market for ads on cellphones. (...)

The long-rumored Google phones are still in the planning stages, and wouldn't be available to consumers until next year at the earliest, say people familiar with the idea. (...) The Google phone project goes far beyond Google's existing deals to include its search engine or applications such as Maps on select handsets (...).

[Google] is drafting specifications for phones that can display all of Google's mobile applications at their best, and it is developing new software to run on them. The company is conducting much of the development work at a facility in Boston, and is working on a sophisticated new Web browser for cellphones.

Google has a lot of deals with cell phone manufacturers and carriers, while most of the services have a mobile version. But it's much easier to improve the user experience when you control the software (mobile browser) and the hardware (the actual phone). It's unclear whether the mobile phones will also have Google's logo.

The specifications Google has laid out for devices suggest that manufacturers include cameras for photo and video, and built-in Wi-Fi technology to access the Web at hot spots such as airports, coffee shops and hotels. It also is recommending that the phones be designed to work on carriers' fastest networks, known as 3G, to ensure that Web pages can be downloaded quickly. Google suggests the phones could include Global Positioning System technology that identifies where people are.

People who have seen Google's prototype devices say they aren't as revolutionary as the iPhone. One was likened to a slim Nokia Corp. phone with a keyboard that slides out. Another phone format presented by Google looked more like a Treo or a BlackBerry. It's not clear which manufacturers might build Google wireless devices, though people familiar with the project say LG Electronics Co. of South Korea is one company that has held talks with Google.

Google has recently expressed the intention to bid in the upcoming auction of spectrum in the 700 MHz bands for the US if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposes some conditions to the winning bidders: users should be able to use any application, services, devices and third parties should be able to buy wireless services and to interconnect in a wireless network. FCC only agreed to the conditions for the users and Google is yet to decide if it will bid. "None of us like how the current system locks you into wireless service plans that limit the kind of phone or PDA you can use, prevent you from downloading and using the software of your choice, and charge you hefty termination fees if you try to get out."

Hopefully Google's phones will have the same openness and will allow you to change your search provider, your browser or your email client. If they're successful and Google finds a clever way to port the ads to the mobile space, the phone and the additional services might be heavily subsidized.

Google Maps Adds Support for the hCard Microformat

Microformats "are simple conventions for embedding semantics in HTML". Microformats let you publish contact cards, events, addresses using a standard so that any software that implements the standard understands them. If publishers used microformats for contact cards and your browser could parse them, it would be easy to save that information and export it to another application.

Unfortunately, not many web sites use them (the most important sites that use them are owned by Yahoo: Flickr, Upcoming, Yahoo Local) and browsers need special plug-ins to understand them. But things are about to change since Firefox 3 will handle microformats natively and Google Maps started to support microformats for local search results. "Why should you care about some invisible changes to our HTML? By marking up our results with the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an addressbook or phone more easily." Google Maps API supports this microformat as well, but developers have to change a few lines of code.

To export the results from Google Maps, you should install the Operator Firefox extension. For other browsers minus Internet Explorer, try this hCard bookmarklet. (If you know a cross-browser bookmarklet or an hCard parser that works in IE, post the URL in the comments.) These tools convert hCard to vCard, a file format that can be imported into many applications, like Outlook or the built-in Address Book from Windows and Mac. In fact, hCard is just an HTML representation of the vCard format that can be obtained by simply adding some standard class names.

<div class="vcard">
<span class="adr">
<span class="fn n">Googleplex<br />
<span class="street-address">1300 Amphitheatre Parkway</span><br />
<span class="locality">Mountain View</span>,
<abbr class="region" title="California">CA</abbr>
<span class="postal-code">94043</span>
</span>
</div>


Google could add support for microformats in its popular toolbar, which already tries to detect addresses and link them to Google Maps. Besides, if more people use microformats, Google has to do less guesswork to extract useful information and to make it searchable.

Jeremy Keith writes: "This is a huge leap in the number of published hCards on the Web. It would be interesting to get exact numbers but I'd guess that the amount of places returned in Google Maps searches runs into the millions. The beautiful thing about all this is that I suspect the change was trivially easy: just adding a few extra class names into a template."

Google Tests New Local Ads Formats

AccuraCast reports that Google tests a new format for local AdWords ads that includes the expandable Maps Plus Box. When you click on the link, Google displays the address of the business, a static map and an option to get directions. This is very similar to what you see next to search results associated with local businesses (e.g.: NY spa).


According to Google, this is a limited test and may not be launched globally. Google has always been reluctant to treat local ads different than the standard ads: even Google Maps used to display ads that sent you to a web page. But things have changed and the ads from Google Maps are placed on the map, the same as the standard results.


Google has also updated the Maps API so that developers can monetize their mashups. "At Developer Day in May, we previewed GAdsManager, a class that would place contextual ad markers for local businesses in a special layer on your map and help you monetize it. We've now released the ads layer with the addition of GAdsManager in Maps API v2.85, and it's ready for early testers."

It's hard to say if integrating an ad into a medium improves the user experience or makes it easier to confuse it with the real content. Google's search results pages contain mostly text, so the targeted text ads are more appropriate than banners, but as Google starts to include more images, videos, expandable boxes in the main results, the ads might become richer and more interactive.

Upload Manager for File Sharing Websites

Fire Uploader is a Firefox extension that lets you upload files to the most popular image/video/document sharing sites from a single interface. Most sites only let you upload a file at a time, but in Fire Uploader you can just drag and drop all the files from a folder.

The extension supports YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Webshots, Box.net, Omnidrive, Facebook, but the author plans to add more sites.

For Picasa Web Albums, you can see the existing albums, create new albums, upload and download photos and delete some of them. While the option to upload photos is also available in Picasa, this extension lets you manage the online photos in an interface similar to a file manager or an FTP client. Note that all the albums created from the extension are public, but you can change that from Picasa Web Albums.



You can also upload multiple videos to YouTube, backup your Flickr photos, download only some of the files from Picasa Web album and manage multiple accounts for a single site. The interface is pretty rough and there aren't too many options you can configure, but if there are so many powerful download managers, why not have an universal uploader for all the sites that store files in the "clouds"? The meaningless power of a single channel to the "cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles"*.

* From "Det sjunde inseglet" (available for free at Google Video)

More Sorting Options in Google Docs

The start page of Google Docs (or Google's basic file manager) brought back the option to archive files, but changed its name: now you can hide the files from all of the views. This is especially useful if you store personal information or if you rarely need some files.

An even more useful option if you have many documents is sorting. Just click on a column's header and you can sort the files by name, collaborator's name, starred status or by date. If you click on the header again, the files will be sorted descending. Unfortunately, the sorting options aren't persistent and every time you open a folder or the main view, the files will be sorted by date (the default option).

Google Spreadsheets also added a sortbar, so you can quickly sort the data in a single column without going to the Sort tab. And if you select some numeric cells from a sheet, you'll see the results of the sum at the bottom of the window, similarly to the quick sum feature from Microsoft Excel. Click on the sum to get other simple results: the average, the minimum/maximum value and the number of selected values.


{ Thank you, Jonathan. }

Google Documents Can't Be Deleted Entirely

One of the main concerns people have about web applications is security. If I store my documents online, can anyone have access to them without my explicit approval? Can I store personal information securely?

Google Docs promises to protect the privacy and security of your content: "Rest assured that your documents and spreadsheets will remain private unless you publish them to the Web or invite collaborators and/or viewers. Once you're logged in, you can grant access to whomever you'd like. Until then, your documents and spreadsheets are private."

But Ralf Scharnetzki found that things are not that bright. Each image included in a document has its own public address, even if the document is private. What's more, if you delete the document and remove it from "recycle bin", the image is still available.

So Google Docs treats images as independent entities, separate from the documents. In fact, the documents from Google Docs are just HTML files that reference external images. In most word processing file formats, the images are a part of the document and can't be accessed if the document is password-protected.

Ralf raises an interesting problem: "How can we talk about privacy on the Web if we can NEVER be sure that our private content (like mails, draft mails, documents) will be ever finally deleted from any of the services out there today?" Of course deleting a document and all of its backups takes time, but it would be nice to know if it does happen.

Meebo Grows Faster Than Google Talk

According to a study released by Nielsen/NetRatings [PDF], Meebo is the instant messaging solution with the highest US growth in the last 10 months. Meebo, a web messenger that lets you connect to Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ICQ and Jabber/Google Talk, increased its US user base from 434,000 to almost 2 million. In the same period of time, Google Talk grew from 904,000 to 2,25 million users. It's unclear whether the study only included Google Talk's desktop client or it also considered the web interfaces from Gmail and iGoogle. The more powerful Skype has 2,6 million users in the US.

Meebo became popular because many schools and companies blocked access to instant messaging clients and their web versions were almost unusable. Of course, Meebo was also blocked, so it came up with an HTTPS version. Now even if Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and others build online interfaces, people still prefer Meebo, the all-in-one messenger.

Free Access to Wall Street Journal and Other Subscription Sites

Subscription is not the best model for the online version of a newspaper or magazine: less people link to you or quote you, your audience is more restricted and you forget that not everyone affords to pay for your information.

If you don't have a Wall Street Journal subscription, you must have seen articles that look like this (most of them are fully indexed by search engines, so you can see them in the search results):


You're able to read a preview, but to see the full article, you need to pay $99 for an annual subscription. For recent articles, you can do a search on Google News and read the whole article from there: Google has a deal with Wall Street Journal so that all the articles can be read for free. It's called first click free: "The very first article view by a Google News user (identifiable by referrer) doesn't require subscription. While the first article can be seen without subscribing, all clicks on the article page are trapped. This means that if users click anywhere else on that page, they will be prompted to sign up."

But to read articles older than 30 days or to be able to actually browse WSJ's site, you need something else. Congoo Netpass is a free toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox that lets you read articles from many subscription sites, including Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Morningstar, Encyclopedia Britannica. You just have to create a free account and install a toolbar. Some of the sites are accessible directly, others only if you search from the Congoo toolbar, but the catch is that your access is limited to a number of views per month.

The Netpass uses patented technology and creates a free bridge which spans the divide between expensive information services and the mass of information available on the free Web. Millions of information seekers want access to subscription content but do not require a full subscription. These users just need access to view a few articles from many different subscription sources monthly. Congoo's technology unlocks hundreds of these subscription content sources without having a paid subscription so you get access when you need it.

Congoo also has a news site similar to Google News and has recently started to build a social network around news.

Google Indexing Many Web Pages in Real-Time

A year ago you had to wait days if not weeks to see your content indexed by Google. Now many web pages are indexed in 5-10 minutes. At least that's the case for many blog homepages, which are updated in almost real time. Here you can see the homepage of a PageRank 4 blog:


...and here's the proof that the blog post was created 11 minutes earlier (the result is from Google Blog Search):


Google could use the ping feature of the blog search engine to get notifications when a site is updated. This doesn't work for all the blogs, so there may still be a prioritization algorithm.

Update (less than half an hour later):

Google's Intranet Search Engine

Google Enterprise Blog shows a screenshot of MOMA Next, an experimental front-end for Google's intranet search. Google uses its own search appliance to index more than 100 million internal documents.

The familiar interface gives Google employees easy access to all kinds of data: contacts, shared bookmarks, refinements. Unfortunately, the design is kind of cluttered and the search takes a lot of time.


MOMA is the name of Google's intranet. An ex-Googler tells its story:

"MOMA was designed by and for engineers and for the first couple of years, its home page was devoid of any aesthetic enhancements that didn't serve to provide information essential to the operation of Google. It was dense and messy and full of numbers that were hard to parse for the uninitiated, but high in nutritional value for the data hungry. MOMA displayed latency times, popular search terms, traffic stats for Google-owned properties and, at the center of it all, a large graph with colored lines labeled with the names of Muppet characters. (...)

I came to take it for granted that any information I needed about Google could be found on the intranet, from the status of products in development to the number of employees at any point in the company's history. (...)

Google eventually clamped down on who had access the complete state of the business; ostensibly because such information needed to be restricted unless everyone was going to be registered as an insider and restricted from freely buying and selling the company's stock."

Here's another screenshot from a MOMA search for Googlers (credit: The Back Pack Zac Attak).

New Data in Google Trends

Google Trends has new data. The last update was in March, so Google should allocate more resources to this project and push new data more frequently.

Some trends: the number of searches for Google Maps grows faster than for Mapquest, the leader in online maps; Facebook has stirred a lot of interest lately, but the number of searches has barely surpassed orkut's searches; Google Reader grew a lot since last year's relaunch, while the interest for Bloglines is constant; YouTube generates more interest than Google. Can you find some interesting trends for this year?