My offer to Google Reader
fury.com
fury.com
Also, rabble rabble rabble too much white space rabble rabble rabble. I tried some of the community created userscripts to see if the "UI improvements" people were making actually helped and in the large part they don't as the people writing them don't seem to understand UI design.
However, given the fact that laptops dominate computer sales nowadays, I'm downright amazed they didn't test it further on small screens.
They also get a laptop (most choose a 15" MBP). I seriously doubt non one saw it on a smaller screen.
One man's "community [they were] already involved in" is another man's "disconnected community." Speak for yourself
I had a carefully cultivated list of cranks, miscreants, and technologic misanthropes who found some very interesting content and had some very interesting discussions, largely by way of the "note in reader" bookmarklet.
That whole community vanished for me overnight, without even a head nod for how to get it back, and I'm a bit upset about it. Publicly "+1"-ing something isn't even a first order approximation.
I can see how removing the social features upsets readers, but they mentioned them before they were going to do it and allow you to move your data out if it no longer suits you. To me, using the notes for commenting always felt off, really never felt like a real conversation. I like the ability to share something to my specific circles and then discuss it there, you don't have to only click that little +1 button under the post if you don't want it public.
This seems to be the way that Google works on things. Huge changes, then iterate until it is usable again. They knew they were going to burn users, in this case very loyal users, to make a better product that aligns with their overall goals. I assume they will bring better social integration in the future, though when that will be, who knows.
I'm sorry if my reaction seemed a little strong; you mentioned not being able to understand the sentiments you were hearing. I am suggesting that as my tiny online community vanished overnight, perhaps you could empathize with that and extend that to the other incomprehensible sentiments you were hearing.
I, for one, have resisted any sort of move towards pitchforks or torches or even (gasp) public condemnation, because I acknowledge that this is, indeed, how google operates, and also that as a user of a "free" service, that this is its actual cost. And i do still hope that the aspects of Reader that fostered such a good community can be rediscovered in G+; it's bugged me since G+ launched that the integration with things like Reader was poor.
And it may yet improve along those lines! -- Doesn't make me any less sad about the loss of my community, though...
(Likewise, you might not have used "Notes", but they could be both public or private, serving as both a vehicle for discussion or a bookmark-service for research, archiving, etc, a la pinboard or delicious. Again -- maybe not a feature that you used, but one that people who did use now need to replace.)
Don't be rude. Dissing people for having newish accounts breaks the guidelines.
...Can you really tell me it got easier to share now that it's G+ and not Reader?
Yes. It works fine for a lot of people, and observing this does not invalidate your complaints.
Yes. It works fine for a lot of people, and observing this does not invalidate your complaints.
Can you tell me about this? Previously, i had one-click share within Reader, and two click sharing from the web via a bookmarklet. I am genuinely curious about how this got easier with the new Reader.
What's your workflow now to share an article with a carefully curated group of friends?
The social features of Reader were not great, but we had an active group of about 30 people who shared research papers. Quite a number of new collaborations and papers were born in Reader comment threads. I see between 100 and 200 items each day, perhaps 20-30 of which are scientific papers shared by colleagues. G+ is generally not very utilitarian and it's clearly worthless for this use case.
You can do that. Use "Share" in the upper right of the OneGoogle bar.
Also, I can't hit l to like (maybe p to plus now?) or shift+s to share.
You can change my sharing options, you can change the look and feel. But messing with my keyboard shortcuts is tantamount to murder.
Before, sharing an item would change the text to "Shared" so that you could both 1.) see that it was shared and 2.) click again to undo the Share. Now, you would have to go to G+ to check.
I wrote a whole post defending the change here: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the...
Regarding the visual design, I hope they'll take cues from the Gmail redesign, which hit a really great balance between clean whitespace-full minimalism and density configurability.
However for me the crucial missing feature is being able to view and comment on your friends' shared items within Reader.
I'm completely OK with Google requiring me to have a Google+ account, and see the sense in the merging of the two 'social networks'. I'm also fine with my shares appearing on Google+. I'm happy to configure a Circle to handle my shares.
But there's no way for me to read the items that my friends who are Google Reader users have shared _within_ Reader, as either individual or merged RSS feeds. This is something I used to be able to do, and now I can't - with no replacement.
That's why the backlash is justified in this case.
PS - Google you could make me happy just by having a 'Friends shared items' menu item which aggregates Google+ shares from Reader. That's all it would take.
I'll have fond memories of pressing 'Shift + S', C, and typing a message to a small group of mates for a while though. Those were the days!
If they just added a place where you could view other people's posts in Reader, that'd be perfect. Let it pull from a Circle or something and that's it.
This article seems no different than any other of the reader articles submitted in the last few days (especially the one by the other former googler that worked on reader).
If his offer were serious because he really really cared about the product, he would have sent an email.
If his offer were serious because he really really cared about other users, he would have posted some user scripts (which lots of others have already done).
Second, what makes you think I didn't send an email?
Maybe it's a browser/OS problem or something (Ubuntu 11.10, Chromium 15). I haven't heard anyone else mentioning this, but I can't be the only one...
Today I switched to Bloglines, and I can keep using j, k, etc.
I have to thank Google, however, for making my switch so easy with their export utility...
The reason I think this extension makes sense is purely because users should have control over the way in which they read and see content. I'm not a big fan of restrictions being imposed on us just because some designer somewhere thought that's the way it should be. I've built in an editor that let's you create your own viewing interface. Give it a shot!
(If you'd like to check it out, http://getlilina.org/ )
As soon as I see that something was written in PHP, my prejudices announce that it is probably badly written and full of security holes.
- Get rid of the sidebar completely and just allow to navigate through feeds with j and k keys.
- Ability to save posts for later.
Until recently Google Reader was just good enough but with the recent changes, it became just too painful. I'm not talking about the "social" features; I never used them. It was the poor layout and design, wasted real estate and especially the broken key shortcuts that did it.
So now Google has lost access to all my RSS habits.
It has also been a lesson to me in SaaS solutions (Software as a Service). When the provider can make substantial changes in their service at a whim, they can leave you high and dry. You're no better off than when you put yourself in the hands of a commercial software vendor or, dare I say it, Ubuntu :-)
Now happily reading the HN feed and others through gnus...
No social features, and no straightforward way to sync across computers/devices, so it's not at all a replacement for Google Reader in its entirety.
I love everything else from the redesign, it's cleaner and generally takes up less space but the design should be more about the content and less about Reader.
I'm not a fan of the new UI yet, but I suspect in a few weeks I will have forgotten what the old one was like.
People like the feeling of being in control, and a change they did not expect and cannot undo undermines that feeling.
This is enough to make links mostly invisible, and makes Reader much less useful as a feed reader for me.
In a few weeks I'll either be using a different feed reader, or my eyes will be much better at distinguishing dark grey from black.
He spent 5 years at Google, including being the lead designer on the Google Reader project. It's not like he's some schmuck out of nowhere, and I don't think he asked to be a one-man team.
From Google's perspective I wouldn't rehire this guy.
That being said, I hate the new Google Reader. I used it primarily as sharing tool, and the new sharing makes that more difficult. I think two fixes would make this better:
1) Being able to share easily with different circles. While I might be okay sharing publicly something interesting, there are plenty of less-than-appropriate funny articles that I only want to share with a few friends. This is one of the strengths of Google+, and it'd be great if Reader could take advantage of this.
2) Being able to see shared articles from other people. I understand they want to increase traffic to Google+, but this was always a great feature of Reader. In effect, each friend that used reader became their own feed. It'd be great to still have this feature and even though you're decreasing traffic to plus.google.com, you'd be increasing the overall use of Google+
.entry_content needs to be 1.5em at the least.
Wouldn't it be better to have the freedom to implement your own version of what the ultimate Reader is, especially in newer tech [ websockets, node.js, realtime updates, drag to rearrange widgets .. whatever ]
Id love someone to make a nice reader [and a nice mail groups] web app, Id enjoy working on these myself. It must be more efficient to build these things outside of Google, as a startup.
An RSS reader with nice UI, realtime update, location sensitivity, smart filters, and unobtrusive social features .. you had me at RSS :]
(They sold to Facebook for $50MM)
note - the Chrome Web Store has also taken a usability hit, in my view. YouTube was done fairly well, and I think that team should be moved across to do other products, or train other teams about what and how to do things.
What the hell are they thinking?
Has Larry let the MBAs get out of control? There's clearly something wrong, as no sensible, actual user of these products surely could believe that this mess is an improvement?
This is on a par with the del.icio.us mess.
Here's a concrete example in the form of a comparison between old Gmail and new GMail.
Page headers for old and new Gmail compared: http://imgur.com/a/X4gdp
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3190205
"If I remember correctly, Google engineers are given the choice of one 30" monitor or a two 24" monitors,"
That explains all. At the time "normal people" converge to notebooks and laptops with even less height, they "optimize" UI for their immense screens. The managers who approve also test it on their 30 inch screens. And they certainly don't understand the complaints, probably saying:
"don't you all have 30 inch?"
"let them eat cake."
I have an old notebook with 1050 pixels height and even there the new changes are annoying to me. What's with now more common 768, 800 and 900 pixels?
That's very nice, but I think 'git checkout -f PRE_POOCH_SCREW' would probably work just as well.