Let’s be honest here. We should all be honest. Google shapes our world view.

They are the information hub for most of us. What we search for and what they then return to us is chosen by computer code that creates the lens we view the world with.

A group of humans wrote that code but it runs on its own and presents relevant links to information that it thinks you are looking for.

Buzz is set to make those results better by adding new human elements to participate in the selection process for your searches. Those human elements will be your connections in Buzz and the great mass of data that will aggregate from Google Reader shared feeds, their own RSS feeds, tweets, Yelp reviews, etc. Whatever they choose to add to the Buzz mix.

There are two component of this that I’d like to share with you. Through research and some projects I’ve had the benefit of being able to analyze the consumption and sharing activities of many people.

You would be surprised to find that many of think that we are missing or not finding relevant information online. That someplace online there is a cache of knowledge that awaits. Wrong. There are some outliers but in aggregate we all typically read the same content from the same publishers.

What Google will work diligently to do is surface the all of this data with the human elements. I’ve talked in the last week about Surfacing Optimization and it will become more important than ever for publishers, but I digress. Google will pull information from the buzz your contacts create and rate it before it displays your future search results.

They are about to up their curation game by about 100%.

The second component of this is that there should be no doubt that these results will be relevant to you simply because in aggregate they have so much data about you. They know your preferences, friends, subscribed feeds, phone calls, sms, mobile and the list goes on. We’ve had Google employees comment before when I have made statements regarding this data, but we can all be honest that it does exist within the Google ecosystem and is finding its way closer together.

If you think that it really isn’t that big of a deal then think of what data you publicly share through Google services daily – just the public stuff. Buzz is simply a tool to put it all in one place. Couple that with the data that isn’t public and it is a collection for data that can be mined not only for better search results but product development and beyond.

Later today I will have an example of this public data in aggregate once I get some more blog posts cranked out.

For now let’s return to Buzz and how it is going to improve search results. Months from now Google will be a brand new search engine, not a social media powerhouse. This is how they compete with Facebook and the impending Facebook email and probably search.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Buzz – Gmail Goes Social (manolith.com)
• Is Google Reader Still an RSS Reader? (staynalive.com)
• Can Google Buzz Succeed Where FriendFeed Couldn’t? (readwriteweb.com)
• Buzz? Really, Google? (thedutchfiles.com)
• Google Buzz (newtrierlibrary.blogspot.com)

Buzz for a Better You? is a post from: TechStartups.com

The internet is an amazing place where the psychographic is king and content is really the queen.

How do I know? Because I have more in common with a British teenager that goes by the handle RandumBoi than I do my best friends.

In my last post about the Bevery Hsu fontspiration Helvetica Cookie Cutters I had a line that highlighted the path that the story traveled to find its way to me. See:

Via -> RandumBoi -> Design Mom -> SwissMiss -> How Blog -> Beverly Hsu

In this list RandumBoi rules as the final person in the chain that delivers the article to me. He’s shared it in Google Reader from the Design Mom blog . . . and you get the idea. This is trusted discovery applied.

To make this happen, I’ve had to create a system for trust. I wrote a web application that I am hoping to open up to the public that shows me content from sources that I trust. These are individuals that I have found some interest in their shared readings and now collect all of it.

There are very few systems that will allow readers to read in aggregate what other members other members are finding interest in. However, Google Reader is one of them. But the problem is, and always has been, Google hasn’t made this process easy.

Their apprehension could stem from publisher anger, design flaws in their application or countenance for mediocre product features when certain development teams aren’t a priority. Regardless of the answer being any of these three or another, I fixed what I view as the problem for myself.

The best part of creating my own solution has been that I’ve been able to apply the notion that – “the news will find me” – Steve Rubel (Seesmic presentation), and replicate it numerous times everyday when I log in to see what my favorite and trusted 100 Google Reader compatriots are sharing.

Trusted discovery is also about extending the life cycle for content. The consumption chain in almost every other application, and most definitely the content sources’ website, would have ended with RandumBoi being the final link – or even before him. But instead of passing off into oblivion, a set of systems to recommend by sharing content has given it new life.

This is where the psychographic begets social intelligence from content sharing and the web can start to truly tap into semantic technologies.

Trusted discovery is only possible as we allow individuals to curate what traditionally was left up to huge news rooms. This is a new era of consumption.

For fun, check out this feed of Steve Rubel’s items, see item 6 – http://www.filome.com/1/SteveRubel.rss.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Share Articles in Google Reader without Google Reader (techstartups.com)
• Follow changes to any website (googlereader.blogspot.com)
• Keep an eye on changing pages (mattcutts.com)
• Anyone Still Using Friendfeed? (centernetworks.com)
• Is RSS on it’s way out? (webmetricsguru.com)

Trusted Discovery Applied is a post from: TechStartups.com

If you are a feed junkie and like to take your world in by reading about it in Google Reader then this post is for you.

I am partially one of those people and rely heavily on shared content to shape my world view. Not only shared content from other folks reading and sharing the best but from myself as well.

Occasionally, I find myself traversing the web following link after link and ending up in places that I am not familiar with and in front of me is something amazing that I want to organize into my flow. My flow is Google Reader and the “Note in Reader” bookmarklet is my friend.

Step #1 – Get the bookmarklet

Login to your Google Reader account and go to your  “Shared items”. On the middle right you will see a gray button that titled “Note in Reader – drag me”. Drag this to your browser tool bar.

Step #2 – Find something interesting that you want to share

Navigate to the individual post for the page. Then click on the “Note in Reader” button in your browser tool bar.

Step #3 – Get sneaky!

The button when clicked will open a modal window in the page you are on. When it loads up, however, it won’t grab the full content of the post that you are interested in. It will only grab a synopsis. NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

So, get your mouse finger ready, highlight and copy the entire post. Then paste that sucker in the “Add a note” textarea.

Step #4 – Voilà

Now in Google Reader or any other application that reads your shared feed. You’ve got the post, publisher and link back to the original article!

That’s all she wrote! Get to sharing and create that knowledge base of tacit goodness that you didn’t know that you knew!

Share Articles in Google Reader without Google Reader is a post from: TechStartups.com

Back in the day, about 5 years ago to be a little more precise, podcasting was just kicking off and finding its legs.

One of the tools that helped it grow during this infancy and start walking was iPodder. It was later renamed Juice for obvious reasons.

Juice allowed anyone, for free on PC, Mac or Linux to subscribe to podcast feeds and start time0-shifting their media consumption. This was a huge, huge deal at that time.

What we were witnessing then was the demise of traditional media from the ground up. I am very proud to have participated in this from near the beginning in November of 2004. What I am even more proud of however is that Juice is still available today.

It is a simple alternative to iTunes and other feed readers. It does one thing and one thing well, download podcasts. It doesn’t matter what type they are mp3, aac or ogg – this app will grab them and download them for you.

Juice’s simplicity lies it its clean UI and adherence to the RSS 2.0 spec. There is nothing fancy about the utility except for some well crafted buttons and mouseover events that direct the user in usage.

Juice also handles authenticated RSS feeds like a champ. Allowing users of say Google Reader the option to receive authenticated media feeds and download the enclosures to their computers.

So if you’re in a hurry or feeling nostalgic someday . . . like maybe now, head over and download Juice.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Podcasting 101, by Elise Michaels (slideshare.net)
• Palm Outs RSS Feeds for webOS App Catalog (jkontherun.com)
• Caffeinated: The Next Big Thing in RSS Readers for Mac? (macstories.net)
• RSS Feed Reader RSSOwl (ghacks.net)

Rediscovered: The Original Podcatcher, Juice is a post from: TechStartups.com

Over time I’ve built a workflow that allows me to post, share and syndicate my media, status updates and interesting news with one or two clicks. (The fewer actions, the better in my opinion.)

Most of the social sharing and syndication I perform is via Google Reader – I typically share news items that I find interesting in the general categories of gadgets, marketing (online, offline, events, traditional, etc.), media (social, digital, old and dying, etc.), green tech and a few others.

Twitter is the real-time searchable stream that is indexed these days so I prefer to share things with my friends and followers there and of course, that requires a bit of integration. Thanks to FriendFeed, I’ve been able to share my Twitter updates everywhere and have all my other social activities shared via Twitter.

The one downside to this integration model and workflow? Data.

While FriendFeed has been great at moving items in and out of the TwitterStream, it doesn’t provide me with any click data. I decided that if I want to learn about what makes people tick (and click), I need to gather some click data.

For about two weeks now I’ve been using HootSuite almost exclusively. It’s the first web-based twitter client that allows me to view my Twitter Lists and groups in a layout that I like but most importantly, it has an integrated URL shortener with statistics.

As a result, I’ve had to make some big changes in my Twitter and media sharing workflow.

Desktop: Google Reader

Instead of simply clicking the “Share” icon in Google Reader, I’ve now added a menu item under “Send To”. Using a quick how-to that I found, I created a menu item that passes the Post Title and Post URL to HootSuite and allows me to review it before I post.

Desktop: Hootlet

For other items that I would normally share via Twitter using copy and paste from my browser, I’ve installed the Hootlet – a bookmarklet with similar behavior to what’s noted above, except it works for any page, not just Google Reader items.

Mobile: Hootlet for Mobile Safari

I found a quick how-to that enables me to use the Hootlet in mobile Safari. It behaves the same as if I were using it on my desktop.

Mobile: Newsie + Hootlet for Mobile Safari

For reading RSS items on the iPhone I use Newsie, a Google Reader client for iPhone ($3.99 and worth every penny).

When I find something I want to share while reading items in Newsie, I click “View in Safari,” then use the Hootlet in mobile Safari to share it.

Mobile: HootSuite for iPhone

I’ve purchased ($1.99) and installed the HootSuite app for iPhone. It’s not as robust as Tweetie, but I don’t use it for reading my TwitterStreams – I use it to view my HootSuite stats on the iPhone.

Wait a minute – why am I going through all this trouble again? Yeah, I ask myself that sometimes, too.

I’m hoping to find a solution so that I can just click the “Share” icon in Google Reader and have the item automatically pushed through HootSuite, shortened and tracked in order to simplify my workflow.

If you have any suggestions on how to accomplish that easily, I’d love to hear them.

Disclosure of Material Connection: http://dsclzr.us/0

Related articles by Zemanta

• 3 Fast Google Reader Clients For The iPhone With Lots Of Features (shegeeks.net)
• Readtwit – Turn a Twitter Feed Into a RSS Aggregate Feed (makeuseof.com)
• HootSuite for iPhone: the Owl for Professional Users (macstories.net)

Got Data? How Changing My Social Sharing Workflow Is Making Me Smarter (I Hope). is a post from: TechStartups.com

I’ve rekindled an old flame. (Not that kind of old flame. I’m married…)

Thanks to Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb, I’ve rediscovered an application that I had to leave behind when I switched from Firefox – it’s called Feedly and makes reading RSS feeds pure pleasure.

Unlike Google Reader, which is a web application or NetNewsWire, a desktop application, Feedly takes an approach that is somewhere in the middle. At it’s inception it was installed as a Firefox add-on but is now available as a Chrome Extension on Mac/Windows/Linux.

Why is it so great?

It transforms feed reading from a “folders and lists” experience to one that is more like a personalized web site created just for you. More importantly, it syncs with your Google Reader account so that you can continue to use whatever interface you like on your iPhone, BlackBerry, etc. Or, should you tire of Feedly (I didn’t – I grew tired of Firefox on the Mac) you can easily switch back to Google Reader without any switching costs.

Cover

This view provides you with an overview of items in your feeds based on your reading history, freshness and so on.

Dashboard

This view lets you manage your feeds right from within feedly. Feedly syncs your subscription changes with Google Reader.

Latest

Exactly what it sounds like – the latest updates to your feeds organized in reverse chronological order.

Folders

It’s not called folders, but in the left navigation feedly provides a list of your Google folders which allows you view an aggregated group of items or individual feeds.

Shared Items

Your Google Reader Shared Items.

Saved Items

These are your Google Reader Starred Items.

Explore

Exploration is a common theme in feedly. Feedly recommends other content sources you might like in the right column either as specific feeds or category groupings. In this image feedly is showing the contents of the Explore menu from Google Reader.

Karma

This is a Twitter related view showing you links you’ve posted and the number of retweets on that item.

Comments

This view shows the items on which you’ve commented in Google Reader.

Recently Read

Like it sounds: items that you’ve recently read.

Feedly runs blazingly fast in the nightly builds of Chromium for Mac which are nowhere near ready for release. I can only imagine that the experience will get better as we grow nearer to the final release of Chrome for Mac. I haven’t tested feedly on Windows or Linux but I would imagine that the speed is typical of Chrome.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Feedly for Google Chrome Released is a post from: TechStartups.com

On any given day there is so much information that becomes available that it is impossible to make enough time to sift through all of it. Instead things pass us by in this river of news that we might have found valuable.

I’ve written on this blog extensively about shared feeds from Google Reader and other systems for filtering content and watching it bubble to the top. Slurb is a great example of that at a high level.

Nearly two years ago I walked about from this river of content since the current was a vortex of time suck. I made it to the banks, picked up a bucket and waited for my friends to fill it with what they found valuable. And since I call them friends I most likely value the same types of content.

It took quite a bit of trust and some long hours coding. That trust I mention was both in the people I was choosing to fill my bucket and trust that I was picking the right ones. I did. And I haven’t looked back.

However, if you’re not feeling that you can take the steps up the river bank away from your river of news to fill your bucket,  I’ve put together a short list of 5 unfiltered shared feeds that I can’t go without. They are trusted sources that filter everything from politics to geekdom to science to local events.

1. http://www.filome.com/1/robdiana.rss
2. http://www.filome.com/1/tamihania.rss
3. http://www.filome.com/1/Proto.rss
4. http://www.filome.com/1/RickKlau.rss
5. http://www.filome.com/1/mattg.rss

You might notice that I have gotten a little sneaky with these feeds by adding pagination to them. Just trying to give you access to older posts that they have shared.

For fun, check out page 76 of RickKlau’s feed to get a sense of what he was sharing and I was reading this summer.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

5 Daily Shared Feed Favs is a post from: TechStartups.com

The question really is what happens when there are no longer applications that allow us to take web content with us on the go?

The promise of RSS was in the ability host applications to store web content for offline or time-shifted consumption. This played out well in the early days as developers that embraced the specifications of RSS wrote programs that allowed subscription to feeds, stored content locally on a device, allowed the creation of folders and keyword driven categories for grouping.

What hasn’t played out very well is the success of these RSS programs called readers. For some time now they have languished as one competitor slowly took their users away. Many times because they stopped innovating on top of the RSS spec and treated solely as an update mechanism. Which it is but then relegated it to interfaces reminiscent of web mail applications. Who needs more web mail apps?

That isn’t to say that the competitor of which I speak and reference in the title has an application is that much better. It operates likes its sister service, Gmail. Now with the lions share of RSS consumers using it to consume feeds it is putting the competitors out of business or forcing them into niches to seek out revenue.

NewsGator is the perfect example of this with over five rounds of funding under its belt, two client-side programs for reading feeds and a defunct online reader. Their new products boast integration with Google Reader.

If no one can beat Google in this area and the biggest players in the space are moving on to other feed related products, what is to become of time-shifted consumption?

It is not hard for me to envision an internet with only Google Reader as the sole RSS aggregator for consumers. But what comes as an easier vision is Google rolling it into a Wave like application to focus on the real-time aspects of pinging and conversations.

The next great opportunity for RSS and time-shifted culture will begin again when Google does this type of integration and gives up on the feed reader. RSS is the plumbing that keeps content moving around the internet but as soon as Google puts it away as machine language, the humans can pick it up again build applications with a better experience.

Marc Andreessen has said that Web 2.0 was just the web looking like itself. The next versions of feed readers will be feeds looking like themselves.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

What Happens When There Is Only One Feed Reader? is a post from: TechStartups.com

User: Taminania
Location: Norway
Occupation: Psychologist

These sound like the character sketch for the lead in a science fiction piece about some dystopian future. Maybe a future ruled through a bot-mediated reality? Sorry, just had to touch on yesterday’s post about that.

The information above is true in fact. She is a social psychologist in Oslo, Norway that goes by the user name Taminania on Google Reader. And she shares about 20 blog posts on average from her subscription list daily. I have never met or spoken with Taminania but she is a rock star in my world. A smart rock star.

She isn’t the leader of a rogue group fighting for survival in the aforementioned dystopian world. She is a passionate psychologist that seeks out high quality content online in her field then shares it online. In this sharing process the door opens wide to accept her recommendations, nearly tacit, that allow those that come across her Google Reader shared feed enlightened.

In every example of the site that I have built to capture and continue filtering her shared feed, and that of about 59 others, I talk about her shares. By filtering the master feed that Taminania creates through daily user activity I am able to glean what I find most valuable and let the rest flow on by.

Example:

I have created a group called Taminania Science. Where I filter down the entire content database to shares from Tamihania, from any publisher and with the keywords – augmented, brain, reality, science, research.

Which currently yields the following results:

1. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
2. Foreign subtitles improve speech perception
3. Why Do We Dream?
4. Are You Treating Your Computer Better Than You Treat Yourself?
5. New Brain Findings On Dyslexic Children: Good Readers Learn From Repeating Auditory Signals, Poor Readers Do Not
6. Geoffrey Cohen on Identity, Belief, and Bias
7. Bacteria in Gut Linked to Obesity; Western Diet a Factor

Compare this list her current (as of this moment)  full Google Reader shared feed:

1. Drop of water
2. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
3. Google *Chrome OS* To Launch Within A Week
4. Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering.
5. How To Easily Automate Backing Up Your Wordpress Blog
6. A New TV Guide for Internet Television
7. The Introvert’s Guide to People

Of all the links in the first list above I am not subscribed to a single of the publishers. I don’t need to be to get the value of their content. However, I do need a guide like Taminania that has an understanding the topics and the drive to sort the quality content from these publishers. The other thing I need is the software to make it happen. In this case I built it for myself and would love to publicly release it. But in the current version it doesn’t scale very well and has a tendency to crash my server. Who can make this happen for everyone?

The answer is simple – Google. What I have created are features and an automated advanced search that pulls from a pool of data. My pool is currently 43k items. Google’s slightly larger. By a factor of 10k or more I am sure.

What I am able to learn from Taminania’s shares in what is clearly not a dystopian reality comes to me from as close to osmosis as a human can get when it comes to information. In this version of the story we are all learners and we are all teachers. The only problem is that we don’t have the tools we need to teach.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Google Reader and The Osmotic Learner is a post from: TechStartups.com

This is my last feed post for a while. I swear.

That said, it might be the most important one that can help startups, bloggers and established media makers begin to deliver new and better experiences to users.

Check out the  ‘Kris is reading‘ section of Croncast. Go and check it out, be quick. I’ll be here when you get back.

Glad to have you back.

So what the was that, right?

Croncast is my playground for all things nerdy that I can then apply to in my trade without doing it with a client’s dime. So when things break I am not on the hook .

What you just saw was an interesting concept that enhances sharing information online and makes it more personable. You just met the full content feed reader, ‘Kris the Filter’.

I’m going to describe that link destination the best way I can.

1. My server reads my Google Reader shared feed and stores it in a database. This is done with a script that runs on a cron (timed job) every two minutes to get new items – post title, description and timestamp
2. The script stamps the item with the current time that I most likely read the item
3. This is cool – the server runs a script to generate keywords (subjects) from the shared item. The script needs to mature a bit but it is effective enough for now.
4. Then cached posts are pulled up in to the ‘Kris is reading‘ section of the site and ordered by the time that I read them. Really the only way to organize them coherently since the post original times vary based on the author’s time zone.
5. Keywords are displayed below each post. Each keyword is a link that will search all of my other shared items for related posts, has a link to Technorati and  is an entry into a RSS feed for that keyword.
6. I have added a ‘Search my read items’ function so that you can search my shared items for whatever you like. If you want to find items that I have read about about ceratin topic like, Facebook, you can.

What’s happening here is that I am giving you, the reader of my shared feed, the ability to use me as a content filter. And the best part is that you didn’t have to ask me to read up on a given topic that you are interested in. I didn’t have to add it to a to-do list, I was already doing it. And now I’m able to give you access to it in a few ways:

1. Here’s everything that I have read and shared from Google Reader
2. Here’s everything that I have read – now search it by subject
3. Here’s everything that I have read – now subscribe via RSS to a subject (keyword) and get updates every time I read an item about your subject without needing to come back to this post or the site

In this scenario I have become a ’social filter’.  I am able to share an item from a publisher that my current readers might have never found. In a strange way it gives an individual like myself the chance to create a low threshold directory with the ability to be distributed simply by marking items that I like.

It takes Google Reader to a new place beyond a feed reader and makes it a platform for syndication. Google Reader becomes a powerful tool to create new channels of distribution for content that usually meets its end on a subscribers computer. Now it has legs.

How can I see other people using this? Tons of ways.

1. The same way that I am using it to create a history of my own reading with the ability to share right down to the topic level.
2. By individuals respected as gate keepers like librarians. Example – whether the source feeds were running on their library content or the internet they could mark items from those feeds and then give the feed based on a topic to a patron, i.e. happy computer savvy student who doesn’t need to come back and ask for help again.
3. Could be used to share information behind a firewall from corporate blogs. Great way to fatten up a corporate knowledge base by picking and choosing from your qualified authors.
4. You could create micro-repositories based on topics
5. A million other ways that I haven’t thought of yet. Not even quite sure I could come up with a million.

I know that I am not the first to work over a shared feed this way but it was fun to build and I am sure it will be useful in making something else. Maybe it will inspire someone else to do something cool.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Make Use Of Google Reader Shared Feeds is a post from: TechStartups.com

This afternoon I noticed something funny happening with Google Reader shared feeds. It seems that feeds are now mixing namespaces for the main content of the posts.

Previously, all content was delivered via the ’summary’ namespace. When I did a check after getting some null data fields in a database I took a look at the shared feed . . . sure enough there was a new namespace, ‘content’ for the main content. Makes sense. But it is a pain if you are expecting everything to be returned as ’summary’.

My guess is that they are saving time and money by not rewriting the original source feed main content namspace. However, it creates an XML namespace soup that is harder to navigate.

When stuff like this happens it makes me nervous, especially when I am building something on the back of it.

The last time this happened Twitter turned off pagination for getting recent tweets for your friends. It killed a really cool project that I spent more time working on than I care to recount. I’m hoping that Google will not do the same. Fingers crossed.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Using The Magic API is a post from: TechStartups.com

You can only neglect your users for so long before they leave you. The same goes for lovers. And I, was in love with Google Reader once.

Then one day I realized Google Reader wasn’t loving me as much as I loved her. So I walked out. We see each other, maybe once a month or so, for short periods of time while we trade feeds.

Reasons

At first she didn’t accept my privacy when I wanted to put authenticated feeds in the system. Then she wouldn’t allow me to have my shared items back when I asked for them. I wanted all of them . . . but she only gave me 20 at a time. What about the thousands of items I had shared with her? Enough. I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to do something about it.

Solution

Two years ago I began caching my Google Reader shared feed so I could access to all the items. Back then Reader hadn’t added any features around sharing like search. But I had it once I was storing the items. What I had created then was a strange knowledge base that I could now query to find content that I found of value and had filtered for myself.

Value

Quickly, I added about 10 more shared feeds from friends and other people that I respected online. After about two weeks I had forgotten about Google Reader and found myself hanging out with my new friends . . . well, hanging with their knowledge bases. Here I was capturing tacit knowledge from some of the people I respected the most for their minds.

Filtering

What was now stored for my querying pleasure was content from the best publishers on the planet filtered by the sharpest people I could find. I began to build other tools around the data like grouping by publisher, sharer, keywords and gobs of new feeds.

I built tracking around it to see how robots traversed the feeds since the actual data was locked in a password protected site. Which turned out not to be that big of a deal since the title links were directed back to the publishers.

By adding new user controlled filtering mechanisms on top of pre-filtered data that was pouring into the system, it became much easier to produce pages and feeds for topics that interested me.

Here are a couple of feeds to demonstrate what I am talking about:

Keyword: http://www.filome.com/key/1/micropayments.rss
Group: http://www.filome.com/group/ksmith/1/Taminania_Brain_Science.rss
Sharer: http://www.filome.com/1/robdiana.rss
Likes: http://www.filome.com/likes/1/08100556675301148205.rss

What Reader is Doing Now

Since we broke up, she’s been adding features but they are all at the feed level and not down to the individual publisher post level. The Bundles that she allows you to create are feed based. Instead of receiving 1 or 2 items of an interesting topic from a few publishers you get all the items in those feeds . . . many more than 2. It’s like being in a forest and finding a twig that you want and your date cuts down 10 trees and hands them to you saying, “Look, I got your twig. Happy now?”

Where Reader is Going

For fear that they are going to be crushed by Facebook and Twitter, Google appears to have put some emphasis on the Reader team and either given the resources or freedom to improve the system. I would even venture to say that members of the Blogger team might be instrumental in some of these improvements. She should look to her friends for support during difficult times.

Where Reader Should Be

I’m gonna break it down nice and easy.

1. Grouping content at the individual post level
2. Feeds for everything
3. Portability of all shared/liked items from the day a user signs up
4. Content shopping cart
5. New UI – 85% of web users don’t read feeds. Get pretty.
6. Open up as a hub for syndication
7. Give publishers real metrics about subscribers, sharers and likers
8. Allow publishers to create community around these users (within Google)

I am still in love, but I have better things to do

My favorite part of her is still the shared feeds. Like perfume they remain long after she has left the room. They add value to the ecosystem and to the lives of those that have access to them. And since Google Reader is sitting on this massive mountain of filtered and expertly curated data, they should use it as their greatest asset in the coming walk-off with Facebook and Twitter.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Google Reader Got Updates? Don’t Even Get Me Started is a post from: TechStartups.com