A few thoughts after a some use:<p>I was part of a community of people I liked, and now,
after I clicked a button, that was gone. I miss those people already. I don't recall anything on the text that clearly said "oh yeah, stuff will be gone, including your friends, and we meant to do that."<p>If I want to share now, I have to do so publicly with the Internet or click a "share" button way in the upper right and then build up groups. There does not seem to be an easy way to get my friends back and to get them into a reader feed. I apparently have to look at my G+ feed if a friend sends me an item. I do not seem to have any convenient way to filter out those useful posts from all the spam of G+.<p>I had easy access to search a list of things that I had found interesting over the years, and now, I guess I'm going to have to find another program to even look at that. I do appreciate that it was not outright destroyed, so thanks for that kindness.<p>Visually, I'm baffled. Apparently, grey and slightly darker grey are now visually effective colors for distinguishing things. I can, of course, adjust to this but overall it does not instill me with confidence.<p>I am, obviously, now looking for a way back to what I had this morning. If someone figures that out, I'll thank them. If it's something that needs support, I'll support it.
The no-sharing/discovery thing has hit me hard.<p>If anybody out there has a <i>social</i> RSS reader start-up, feel free to reply to this and advertise your service. I will drag my friends to it along with me.<p>(Yes, I use Twitter, Instapaper, news aggregate sites, etc. Yes social software has changed how i would otherwise discover links/news. But I still need an RSS reader, and the passive sharing in old Google Reader is a layer of social that one takes for granted in almost any app. I get why they took it out (they think they're helping G+), but it doesn't work for me.)
One early criticism (aside from the sharing bugaboo) is the header is larger making the allowable reading area much smaller.<p>the topmost the feed content can be read is ~193px from the top of the browser. And you can't scroll down because of the way the page it built.<p><pre><code> Here is what firebug told me:
29px - account bar
59px - search bar
73px - feed toolbar
32px - feed title bar (in the reading pane)</code></pre>
From all the outrage, I'll learn that users will love (or perhaps just grow accustom to) an utterly broken and opaque system as long as it is left around to grow a community. If you used Google Reader's social features before, you impress the hell out of me. I never grokked a single element of it after many years of use. I think Google clearly needed to do something, and integration with G+ is an obvious move. Perhaps the transition could have been smoother, but I cannot really see how the old system was superior in any way except for a very tiny amount of traction.
Took me a while to realise that you had to click the share button in the far top right to share the currently viewed item.<p>The physical separation between the item you're sharing and the screen element you have to click to share it strikes me as rather counter-intuitive.
Back in 2007 I built a social RSS reader called Feed Each Other (<a href="http://feedeachother.com" rel="nofollow">http://feedeachother.com</a>). It was actually pretty good, but I had to give up on it because I ran out of money, Google Reader was slowly stealing all my features, and I found it very hard to convince people to switch from GR.<p>It had stuff like:<p>- "Circles" aka, letting you group your contacts however you like and see what each group shared with you and share stuff with all your contacts or just certain groups.<p>- Feed and user discovery and recommendations. "People who read X also read:" and "Look who subscribes to this feed" type of thing.<p>- Keyboard shortcuts, auto discovery, opml import/export etc. All the usual feed reader stuff.<p>Check out this old intro video I made for it (social/interesting parts start around 1:40). The design in the video is out-dated though, it ended up looking like this, <a href="http://feedeachother.com/screenshot_500.png" rel="nofollow">http://feedeachother.com/screenshot_500.png</a>. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Ltwh4AO_w&feature=youtu.be#t=97" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Ltwh4AO_w&feature=youtu...</a><p>Maybe I should turn it back on? Any takers?
The new design is definitely cleaner and consistent with other Google products, but it is not a design focused on providing a great reading experience (as the product name "Reader" suggests). It is basically the Gmail layout and interaction model, just different content. I wish Google had taken an approach that deeply focused on the content first (as Flipboard does).
It looks cleaner, but overall it's less readable. The old Google Reader featured distinct boxes for each news article. But now Google got rid of this so the articles all sort of glue together and the only way to distinguish articles is by the focus effect and the headings.<p>Also I'm not sure what prompted Google to move the star button from the left of the heading to the right. Titles are variable-length so it doesn't make sense to put a frequently used UI element in a position where it would constantly change..
This thing has an acre of useless interface and padding. With the rise of instapaper, safari reader, reeder, readability, etc, how did they possibly think more clutter was the right direction to go.<p>I really think Google makes decisions like this: "The data says the search bar is only used occasionally. Okay, so that means it needs to be bigger so more people use it." Search in a reader is fine, but it needs to be about as prominent as
"search this page" is in a browser.
How do I turn my friends' Google+ posts into RSS that can be consumed by Google Reader? Google+ does not seem to advertise RSS feeds.<p>Someone wrote an AppEngine service [1] to transcode Google+ to RSS, but they shut it down after Google raised the AppEngine feeds.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ghacks.net/2011/07/13/google-plus-rss-feeds/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ghacks.net/2011/07/13/google-plus-rss-feeds/</a>
It's crazy to me the amount of grousing about the Google Reader cheese-moving. The old system was an opaque, user-antagonistic, hacked-on mess.<p>The new system (integration with +) is rational and a superset of the old system, as far as I can tell.<p>I also choose to consider this as a precursor to many rational changes/extensions to Google Reader.<p>Let me be clear: I am sooo glad that I can finally direct Google Reader shared items to specific groups, so I don't have to spam everyone who follows me with every single item, which pretty much guaranteed that 80% of my feed was irrelevant/stupid/boring to any given person.<p>Now all I need are public, topical feeds that are subscribable/discoverable. RSS, in other words.
I hope there is enough contrast between unread and read items. It took me a while to get used to the gmail overhaul with their new design.<p>But integration with plus is definitely a welcome change. More often than not, I've decided against sharing simply because it's inappropriate to everyone following me.
Sigh. I like the redesign (it's about time!) but I hate that they're turning off sharing. I use that to run my link blog, and now I'll have to figure out another workaround.
Dear Google,<p>here is what my screen looks like after the redesign: <a href="http://imgur.com/ppg4o" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/ppg4o</a><p>Notice that about a third of it is used up by various chrome.<p>Now, I realize that every Google employee is issued two wall-sized hi-res screens the moment they step up to their desk, and quickly forgets what it was like to work using mere 21st-century technology. And if they ever use a laptop, it is always a sleek Chromebook which shows you a full-screen view of the web and a tiny, exquisitely designed window titlebar in a tasteful shade of blue.<p>But for those of us still stuck outside the bubble, it sure would be nice to have a way to collapse some of that whitespace....
I liked the search by shared items. Thankfully I always star and share, therefore I can still search (Google +1's search is pathetic, as it is non-existent).<p>Still wish they'd give +1 a search tool, and make all the previously shared items shared on Google+. But then again, this is power-user wishlist, and Google has been moving away from us.<p>This is not so bad for Google+, as it has an API, but it is terrible for Google Reader, as it still doesn't have an API. Guess this[1] issue was not starred enough on Google Code...<p>[1] <a href="http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=29" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=29</a>
I don't know why tristan_louis' comment is dead, but they bring up very good point, far more egregious than either the social sharing changes or the design and screen real estate issues:<p><i>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.</i><p>Reader is now painful to use, imo. I'm constantly waiting for it to catch up to my actions.
Problem: Can no longer access old "notes" or "shared items"<p>Solution: Turn them into "starred items"<p>Details: You can only access notes or shared items from certain mobile or desktop clients. I don't know exactly which ones but the one I used was MobileRSS (iOS). Go into the "notes" folder and manually star every item (you don't need to star "shared" items because all of them are notes, but not all notes are shared items). If you want them in chronological order, you'll need to start with the oldest first, the second oldest second, etc. It took me less than 10 minutes to star my 131 items.<p>If you don't do this, you can't view or search for anything in "notes" or "shared items." However, you CAN view and CAN search them so long as they are starred items.<p>So far as I know, there is no longer a way to get content into Google Reader via the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet. It is no longer supported. This means that any site without an RSS feed cannot have any pages brought into Google Reader, so far as I can tell.<p>I wonder if there is a service that turns a site into an RSS feed on the fly? Then you'd be able to subscribe temporarily and star the item. Probably not convenient enough to use as a read it later (or archive in Google Reader) service, as I've been doing for the past couple years.<p>I've found that the easiest way to search for archive-worth web pages I've read years ago is to search my stash in Google Reader. Using a search engine doesn't always find old stuff which may be buried in search results or no longer on the web.
Google Reader circa yesterday provided an inbox-style interface for all of your content. A feed had read and unread items, and folders allowed you to compose macro-inboxes, and (this is the change) shared content was treated in the same way, if not better—new comments on this content would be clearly indicated, allowing for in-app discussions.<p>Today, Google Reader has made shared content a second-class feed. With the removal of the inbox-style interface, if you miss a friend's shared item on Google Plus (possibly buried in other items), it's gone. The closest you can come to a 'mark as unread' functionality is through a work-around: creating a memberless 'save for later' circle, to share items with. Furthermore, shared content isn't even visible within Google Reader.<p>I can't be alone in thinking this was a good interface for sharing articles. If anybody has an alternative RSS reader with this functionality, please let me know. I would pay for this, but I can see it being a tough sell generally.<p>Conesus, I think you've mentioned in a different thread that you have social features in the pipeline: is this something you're aiming at?
Overall, with the minimalistic Greasmonkey script, it's not bad. One thing that I don't like is that in expanded view, there is no visual indication to differentiate read from unread items. In list view, read items are grey. Why didn't they do something similar in expanded view? I keep having to look over at the unread count on the left.
I must say, this new design is much less readable. I'll probably end up abandoning the web interface altogether and reverting to using Google Reader simply to synchronize my feeds across platforms.<p>Back when I used WIndows, I used FeedReader, but I'm not sure what other programs are out there for Linux or Android that sync with Google Reader.
I think the sharing complaints are overblown (although common sense would have said that they should be ported over into a new G+ circle or something similar). I do think that Reader was badly in need of an overhaul and that bridging it with G+ will turn out to be a winner.<p>But damn, that color scheme is oppressive. It's the New Web Brutalism. I hope that once everything Google is using the same design template they'll offer themes again and let you have one look across all Google products. This whitewash-and-grey with carefully rationed rectangles of primaries is depressing, like a grand opening in North Korea. I'm not saying that to be funny: looking at it makes me feel gloomy and want to do...something else. I'm using Google Docs less as well, for the same reason.
I don't really care anymore about the design of Google Reader. The only thing I use it for is for syncing my read items between my different reader apps (like Reeder for iPad). As long as they keep supporting that I'm fine, but this seems like a service anyone could implement in case they stop the API access.
I had a shot at redesigning the page to make better use of space and condense down the many, many toolbars.<p><a href="http://cl.ly/BRCs" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/BRCs</a>