Google Reader Redesign: The Way Forward
Google Reader Redesign: The Way Forward
This week Google rolled out the redesign of my favorite Google product - Google Reader. This was a much needed face-lift, no doubt – though I am not a fan of the new UI – and more importantly, from Google’s perspective, they were integrating one more service with Google+, the future of Google. This was supposed to make Reader more social, but ironically, in a perplexing move (at least, from the perspective of power users of Google Reader), Google ended up making Reader a less social, and a less useful product overall.
I am not going into the details of how Google fared, and what they could have done better, as many more knowledgeable people have written about that, and I will link to some of them here:
The Google Reader Redesign is an Ugly, Lonely User Experience on Forbes
Google Reader Changes And Feeds Go Missing by Rob Diana
Wherein I try to explain why Google Reader is the best social network created so far by Courtney Stanton
The Google Reader Downgrade by Michael Heilemann
The biggest loss for me is the missing personal curated feed of items shared by awesome folks like Jesse Stay, Rob Diana, Louis Gray, Phil Ashman, and closer home, folks like Mahendra Palsule and Dhananjay Nene, and last but not the least, my friends like Arun and Pradeep.
I would rather read something that is read and shared by these folks than read some item popping up the stream from some source that I follow. Why? Because, I know that these guys had taken the time out to read something and found it worthwhile to share it. Also, when I want to search for something that I had seen/read in Reader, I mostly search Google Reader first, and only if I can’t find the relevant answer, do I resort to a generic Google search.
So, what was the way forward to get back the social aspect I lost? Well, as a first step, I remembered that I read in the morning what Alex had posted about reclaiming your shared items from inside the Reader. That was a first sigh of relief (I would have shared at least 500 items in the last 5 years and so getting that back intact was a big plus!). It then struck me that I can now recreate the shared items from the people I was following using the same technique.
For that, I had to first get hold of the list of people I used to follow. One can get that from “Settings | Import/Export” tab in the Reader, and from there I downloaded the JSON for the list of people that I follow. Though it contained some 50 names, only 10-20 were very important for me (those were the people who were into active reading and sharing on Reader).
I subscribed to their “thus-far” shared items (so that I can still do meaningful searches from within the Reader). Next, thanks to the suggestion from Phil, I followed the steps outlined by Tony Scelfo and ran the script he provided, that parsed the JSON and opened up Google+ profile for each of the users in the JSON. Yes, that opened about 50 tabs for me, and I had to close about 30, but I ended up with the 20 people whom I want to follow for their “shared” items. I added each of them to a new Google+ circle that I called “greader”.
Yes, most of them will not use Google Reader for sharing any more (or with the same intensity) as before, but at least I can easily keep abreast of both what they shared earlier, and what they choose to share publicly on Google+ from now on.
Of course, it would have been best if people taking decisions at Google were a bit more considerate, and had studied a little closer how power users were using the service. But, hey, at least I have something instead of nothing. And hopefully, in the next few months, Google would rethink/evolve the integration further and that might render my effort today a waste. But till then I have my personal shared items and those from my friends safe!
And, is there any silver lining? Yes, there is. First is the hope that someone in Google would listen to what I consider to be very genuine concerns of power users like me, and second is the fact that people like Dave Winer and Francis Cleary are working on making feed reading products better or making better products!
HiveMined Update by Francis Cleary
The Sharebros Are Building a Google Reader Replacement on The Atlantic Wire
What is RWW actually saying? by Dave Winer
Indeed, may be Dave Winer was right all along about both RSS and Google! :)