Google Reader Makes A More Visual Play

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Mar 10, 2010

Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen.

Google Reader Play doesn’t require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it’s very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

Like many of its other recent efforts, especially with Buzz, Google Reader Play is an attempt to encourage more direct sharing and to capture that sharing data. More and more Website referral traffic is coming from sharing service such as Twitter and Facebook. Google wants to be in the sharing game as well.

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Aweb

Doesn’t works with me, keeps loading indefinitly…
http://www.plasticsurgeryinhouston.net plasticsurgeryinhouston

Hey that’s a good joke. I’ll need to remember that one.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=681352548 Brad LaNasa

oops. typo. enjosythin.gs
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=862955211 Federico Imparatta Romero

This is awesome!
http://www.billhartzer.com/ bhartzer

Yeah, it’s pretty cool stuff, but keep in mind that they are keeping track of all of that sharing data. So, if you share it with people then Google will know about it.

That could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it, right?
Etrigan

I’ve gone beyond irritation at every software company forcing ‘sharing’ and ‘social’ down our throats. Now, I’m just terrified. There’s nowhere to have provacy anymore. Even your e-mail inbox, the last bastion of privacy, is being forcefully converted into a public broadcast mechanism by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and everybody.

This is just herding and blind following of strategic fashion. What consumer is actually asking for everything on earth to be social and shared? These tech companies need to understand that human beings have 2 modes: public and private. Please stop converting every software we use into a social network.

It’s annoying, and worse, terrifying because now, you have no idea who is reading what you’re doing, because all sorts of backdoors are being added to your profiles, so people can ‘follow’ you based on stuff you didn’t even know you ‘shared.’

If there’s something I like I want to share with my friends, I know how to do that. I send them an e-mail with a URL link. I’m in control, my choice. Get out of my life. Respect my privacy.
http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/search-engine-optimization-is-social-sharing-the-next-link-building/ Search Engine Optimization: Is Social Sharing the Next Link Building?

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http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2010/03/10/google-reader-play/ “Google Reader Play” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

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http://domramsey.com/ Dom

Pointless.

I use Google Reader to look at the feeds I’m subscribed to, not random unsorted Internet junk shared by the 3 other people I know who use Google accounts for anything more than Gmail.

Seriously, why does everything need to have crappy bolted on social features these days?
http://nobosh.com Brett Hellman

Sorry, but this is a total ripoff of nobosh stream which I released over a year ago.

http://nobosh.com/stream/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=734992743 Ted Rheingold

Too little too late for Reader. Wants change too fast to hope adding features that became popular in 2008 will get people to open reader.google.com again. Amazing how a cutting edge, use-shifting, service like reader went from hot to not in a couple years. But such is the internets.
http://www.vikitech.com Viki

If anyone was wondering there are a few keyboard shortcuts you can use.

Left and Right Arrows to move to next or previous items. You can just use the Spacebar to move to the next item.

Down arrow to minimize the Film Strip and Up arrow to bring it back to original size. Trying to sing if there are any other shortcuts!

If anyone is as used to keyboard shortcuts as me, might find this useful.
http://www.productusp.com/google-reader-bringing-more-visual-way-for-browsing.html Google Reader Bringing More Visual Way for Browsing

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http://www.sriraj.org Sriraj

What?
Hate to see videos in Google reader.
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amolpatil2k

Dear Etrigan, How much I love you for what you said.

But take Digg for instance, it is able to provide collaborative filtering.

The sweet spot is somewhere between Reader and Digg i.e collaborative filtering but delivered to a generalized profile that happens to resemble us without using our private data.
http://www.webdevelopernews.com/2010/03/12/social-sharing-the-next-evolution-of-link-building/ WebDeveloperNews – For Professional Web Developers

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