Today, Google is rolling out its update to Google Reader which features the promised user interface overhaul, and, more importantly, the new Google+ integration. Now, Google Reader users can “+1″ items directly from Google Reader to share it with their friends on Google+. This feature now replaces the “Share” and “Share with Note” options previously present.

As expected, Google has ignored the cries of the niche community of Google Reader sharing enthusiasts (as well as what seems to be the entire online population of Iran), and has pushed forward in its plans to remove Google Reader’s native sharing features to promote deeper integration with Google+. While the ability to share with Google+ is an obvious important step forward for Google’s social agenda, it will be disappointing change for at least some of the Google Reader community – a community that even went so far as to create a petition to save the old features. The petition is now pushing 10,000 responses.

It didn’t have to be this way. Kevin Fox, who helped design Google Reader back in the day, suggested that Google rebuild Reader’s social sharing feature using the Google Plus API as a foundation. That would have kept existing users happy while also allowing others to broaden their reach through social sharing to Google+.

But that didn’t happen.

Even the “we are the (1000+)” #occupyGoogleReader meme (from Google Reader’s creators, no less!) didn’t seem to help.

Google at least acknowledges that it heard the outcry, saying:

We hope you’ll like the new Reader (and Google+) as much as we do, but we understand that some of you may not. Retiring Reader’s sharing features wasn’t a decision that we made lightly, but in the end, it helps us focus on fewer areas, and build an even better experience across all of Google.

And if you don’t like it? Well, too bad – this is the future of Google Reader. For those not happy, there’s the door. #DoNoEvil?

“If you do decide to stay,” writes Alan Green on the official Google Reader blog, Google wants to hear your feedback.

An Android app update will follow, says Google.

Image credit: Chris Wetherell

And while Google is uncertain as to exactly when the highly dramaticized link will be back, the Gmail team is working hard on a fix and is targeting Monday morning, according to representative Victoria Katsarou.

So why remove the link in the first place? Google decides what links appear in the Gmail navigation bar based on popularity, i.e. page views, number of users and clicks from the bar. New products needing promotion are also considered. According to Katsarou, Google Photos (Picasa) had made the cut and was to join Reader in elite navigation bar status, with a fifth top level link added to the bar. Apparently someone somewhere made an error and the Reader link was dropped into the “More” menu instead.

The official Google Reader Twitter account tweeted about the mistake on Friday, but that hasn’t stopped people from emailing us about how upset they are about the change. Reader fan Craig Cosmo went as far as integrating the link back, in his Better Gmail browser extension.

So for those of you who can’t wait until the Google fix, you can get your precious Reader link back into Gmail here. You’re welcome.

Update: It’s back!

More proof that RSS is on its way out, and the apocalypse is nigh: Google has seemingly replaced the top link to its RSS reader product, Google Reader, with a link to ‘Photos’ (Picasa) at the top of the Gmail web interface. To be clear, the link is still there, it’s just hidden behind the ‘More ▼’ link now.

Boy, that place has really started falling apart since Larry Page took over as CEO.

Sure, it’s a minor UI change, but that isn’t stopping users from going nuts about it on Twitter.

A couple of choice tweets:

Another user posits: “Where the F**k is my link to Google Reader in Gmail?!??! I’m sure they can see in Analytics that I use it every single day…”

And therein lies the problem, I think. You can customize Gmail to a degree, and – particularly for a free product – that’s really awesome, but you can’t yet change the order of the top menu items – and that’s what’s getting users riled up.

Maybe Google will listen to this vocal subset of users, maybe they won’t. But I think it may be better if we don’t wait to see what happens, and instead a TechCrunch-reading developer immediately starts coding a browser extension that puts the damn ‘Reader’ link back. Go!

Earlier today, we ran a “TechCrunch 2010 In Review” post featuring some key data WordPress.com sent our way for 2010. Interesting stuff all around. However, as some people have noticed, in our top referrers for the year, Facebook is nowhere to be found. Further, Google Reader, an RSS reader, comes in number three!

Is Facebook dying? Is RSS reborn? Nah. It would appear that referrer data is just a bit screwy.

I ran that data against our own data coming directly from Google Analytics. The view from there is quite a bit different — and interesting.

For 2010, according to Google Analytics, here were our top 10 referrers:

1. twitter.com
2. facebook.com
3. digg.com
4. techmeme.com
5. news.ycombinator.com
6. google.com
7. reddit.com
8. stumbleupon.com
9. crunchgear.com
10. news.google.com

As you can see, like the WordPress.com data, Twitter is number one, but the rest are switched around. Facebook pushed Digg to number three. And Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) swapped with Techmeme. Google Reader, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found in the Google Analytics data. Actually, it is — it’s a subset of the google.com traffic (which doesn’t include search traffic, which is far above any of these referrer sites).

Drilling down, Google Reader was actually the number 11 overall referrer to TechCrunch in 2010. Further, it was way down from 2009 — nearly 50 percent. In other words, yes, RSS is slowly dying. At least when it comes to the most popular feed reader sending traffic to TechCrunch.

So what rose up in Reader’s place? Well, here are the top 10 referrers to TechCrunch from 2009, according to Google Analytics:

1. digg.com
2. google.com
3. twitter.com
4. techmeme.com
5. facebook.com
6. news.ycombinator.com
7. stumbleupon.com
8. reddit.com
9. crunchgear.com
10. crunchbase.com

Again, Google Reader was a subset of the google.com data. Drilling down, Reader would have been number 6 by itself, just ahead of Hacker News (again, news.ycombinator.com) and just behind Facebook. Of all the properties in the top 10, Reader had by far the most dramatic fall.

Twitter an Facebook, meanwhile, saw the biggest rise in 2010. That makes sense since those are the two most often associated with the slow death of RSS. Both shot through the roof when compared to 2009. Twitter nearly doubled as a referrer to TechCrunch and Facebook more than doubled the amount of traffic it was sending.

Techmeme, Hacker News, StumbleUpon, and Reddit all had nice bumps in sending us traffic. Digg fell quite a bit, though not nearly as far as Reader.

Now, a part of all of these bumps is simply because TechCrunch had more content overall in 2010 when compared to 2009. But that makes the Google Reader drop even more interesting. Sure, people can read TechCrunch through Reader without clicking through, but why the huge drop unless fewer people were actually reading it that way?

We’ve reached out to WordPress to see why their data seemed to over-count Reader while massively under-counting Facebook (which was number 20 on WordPress’ list).

A couple other interesting data points:

• In terms of new visitors to TechCrunch, StumbleUpon sends by far the most (percentage-wise), followed by Google News. Techmeme sends the least, followed by Hacker News. That latter two seem to share many common readers with us — no surprise there.
• But for average time on site, Techmeme dominates, followed by Facebook and Twitter. StumbleUpon is the worst here, followed by Reddit and Digg. In other words, people visiting from Techmeme, Facebook, and Twitter actually seem to read the content.

Given the success Apple has seen this year with the launch of the iPad, they decided to single out the device to give it its own “App of the Year” award. The winner? Flipboard. The social magazine app launched in July with some glowing reviews and since then, a few small updates have made it even better. But the update they’re releasing today makes it a lot better. So much so that if Flipboard was already the app of 2010, they’ve got to be the early frontrunners to be the iPad app of 2011 as well.

First of all, Flipboard has added both Flickr and Google Reader integration to bring more content into the system. Users of those services can easily link up their accounts to create new areas to browse on their Flipboard.

But the bigger news is what they’ve added to the content options that have existed on Flipboard since the beginning: Twitter and Facebook. Both of these areas on Flipboard now feature support for various sections of the services. So on Facebook, you can browse items shared in the News Feed, on your Wall, on the various Pages you follow, or filter items by the Friend Lists you have. You can also filter the stream to show just pictures or just links. With Twitter, you can now choose between your standard Timeline, just your Tweets, your Favorites, your @Replies, or any of your Lists.

And all of these new sections can be added as main Flipboard items with one click. To bring them up, you simply click on the section header (so in Twitter’s case “Twitter”, for example) and a pop-over menu appears.

Flipboard has also added the ability to send Tweets and/or Facebook status updates from within the app. When you’re in the Twitter and Facebook areas, you’ll see a new compose button along the top. Clicking on this brings up a composition area, similar to the one that Twitter for iPad uses (so you can still see the content you’re writing about). You can attach images or an article here as well. Clicking on your profile image allows you to toggle between Twitter and Facebook to share — and Flipboard threw in the ability to send a note to Google Reader this way as well.

But you can also update your status from anywhere in Flipboard. If you’re on any of the home screens, simply place two fingers on the screen and drag them upwards. The composition area will appear. If you’re on an actual article page, simply hit the share button and click “Post to…” and the same area will appear.

But there’s more. Flipboard has also altered the way content appears within the app. It used to be that they’d give you a preview of text and make you click a “Read on Web” button to load the full story. Now, depending on the content, they can load that page below the excerpt as you read it. If you click on this area, it will load the full content page for you to read. Or, if the site you’re reading has a full RSS feed, Flipboard will load the content that way. Yes, they’re finally using RSS.

On top of all this, it’s now more seamless to reply to Facebook messages and Tweets as well within Flipboard. And articles can easily be sent to Instapaper to read later. And you can set the Google Reader integration to remember what you  have and haven’t read already, making Flipboard a killer RSS reader itself.

Again, Flipboard was the 2010 app of the year before all of these features. Apple must really be loving their pick right now, because the app just got much better today. But the truth is that they had to. With the success of the iPad, the social browsing space is heating up. Rival Pulse recently released some really deep Facebook integration, making it one of the best ways to view Facebook on the device.

Meanwhile, news broke earlier today that Flipboard CEO Mike McCue has just accepted a seat on Twitter’s Board of Directors. So you can probably expect the integration to get even deeper. “I’m a big believer in the Twitter phenomenon both from a user and ecosystem point of view. So excited to join Twitter’s board and help any way I can,” McCue said when we asked about his new position. Both Flipboard and Twitter now share big time backing from VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers as well.

All of this adds up to Flipboard starting 2011 where 2010 left off: with a bang.

As if they weren’t busy enough releasing the Chrome Web Store, the Chrome OS test drive, and inadvertently letting the first Google +1 image leak, Google had one more trick up their sleeve today: the new Google Groups.

Technically, Google is just previewing the new Google Groups user interface. “The new Google Groups user interface represents the first in a series of updates to Google Groups,” Google writes here. And it really is a complete revamping. The new style is much more in the Gmail/Google Reader mold. And in fact, some elements even seem a little Wave-like.

The key to the new UI is a left-hand menu which gives you easy access to your groups, announcements, recently views groups, and your favorite groups. There are also a new variety of keyboard shortcuts. And profiles can now be more personalized and linked to Google Profiles. There’s also a new editor for adding new topics/discussions.

Google has also completely redone the mobile experience for Groups so that you can easily manage them on the go.

If you visit the Groups homepage, Google says that over the next week or so you should see a message to opt-in to viewing groups through this new UI.

“We’re excited about sharing these improvements with you, but this is just a start; we’re working on improved spam controls, moderation, search, and other freatures to make Google Groups the best way to engage in discussions,” Google notes in the Google Groups new announcement section.

If it seems like this is Google’s answer to the new Facebook Groups, remember that the upcoming Google +1 social product is also supposed to have a grouping mechanism (called “Loops”) tied directly in. Instead, it would seem that Groups is simply Google’s attempt to revive their increasingly spammy public forum area.

Of all the tech echo-chamber arguments, one of my favorites has to be the “RSS is dead” one. Sure, perhaps I’m a bit partial because Steve Gillmor set the discussion in motion in May of 2009 for TechCrunchIT. But it’s still interesting to watch all the sides swarm around the topic. But what’s most interesting lately is how for every one person that busts out the death of RSS meme, a dozen people seem to pop up with posts that refute it.

If RSS is doing just fine, shouldn’t that be self-evident? Why do we need so many posts pointing out just how not dead RSS is?

Just today, we have GigaOM, Dave Winer, and even Google pointing out that RSS is fine. Some, like Winer, say that it simply needs to be rebooted. Others, like Mathew Ingram for GigaOM, point out that the current way people use it will continue to supplement services like Twitter and Facebook that are supposedly killing it.

So what is actually going on?

The fact of the matter remains that RSS is not a consumer-friendly technology. If I said “RSS” to my mother, she would have absolutely no idea what I was talking about. If I said “Twitter” or “Facebook” to her, she knows who those are — she even uses them. That said, RSS does still often provide at least a partial backbone for those services she does know. For example, it’s RSS that auto-syndicates the content from TechCrunch to Twitter and Facebook where she reads it.

But overtime, that reliance on RSS to pump the content into these services is going to continue to erode. Instead, people are more actively sharing content by way of buttons (like the Tweet button and Facebook’s Like button).

Further, as the use of mobile devices continues to rise, new methods of consumption and sharing are going to continue to pop up. Flipboard for the iPad is one example of such a services. And guess what? Though it may look like it does, it doesn’t use RSS.

One of my favorite apps for the iPhone/iPad is Reeder. It’s a Google Reader-based RSS client that is fast and simple — perfect for mobile devices. But the problem with it is that you still need to set up your feeds through Google Reader to use it in the first place. Most people don’t do that. And despite Google’s graphs today (which curiously have no actual numbers) most people aren’t going to do that.

Look, I continue to use Google Reader (and Reeder) on a daily basis and likely will for many, many years. But that’s mainly because I have to for my job. It’s a mass consumption tool — but it’s not a consumption tool for the masses. If I didn’t have to (or didn’t want to) read and track a thousand stories a day, there is no way I would use an RSS reader. It makes reading content seem like a chore. It’s not visual at all, there aren’t great sharing tools, it feels very isolated, and it’s all about packing in as much information as possible into small windows. Ugh.

So while Venture Chronicles writes that consumer RSS lived from 1999-2010, I think that’s incorrect. I’d argue that it was never really alive. A few million geeks and professionals may have used RSS readers like Bloglines, but compare that to Facebook’s 500 million users or Twitter’s 100 million+ users — users gained over a much shorter span. RSS readers were nowhere near that.

And that’s kind of pathetic considering that you had RSS built into just about every major browser for years now. And it was being pushed heavily by companies like Google to customize homepages.

Something else to think about: while a technology may be in use by millions of people, if most have no idea they’re using it, they’re not going to miss it if it goes away. My hunch is that this will be the case with down the line with RSS. Twitter and Facebook won’t completely kill it off because they still use it to varying degrees, but they’ll continue to whittle it down, as will mobile.

As bad of an end-user experience as RSS provides on the desktop, just look at it on mobile. Do you think anyone is going to load up Google Reader mobile and type in URL to subscribe to via RSS? Do you think they’ll even take the time to copy and paste it in? No, because most don’t now.

Some of Winer’s ideas to “reboot” RSS could be interesting, but standards bodies and startups have had how long to come up with such ideas? At least 10 years. And no one has come up with anything compelling yet.

Anyway, that’s all for now until we inevitably have this discussion again in another six months.

Google Reader has been my go-to RSS reader since October 7, 2005. How do I know? A new update to the service today tells me that and a few other interesting tidbits about my reading habits.

Technically, the big news of this update to Reader is a new fullscreen mode. I guess it’s nice to have in certain circumstances (just hit “f” to activate it). But to me that’s a little ho-hum. Much more interesting to me are a few of these new statistics they’re dishing out.

Aside from how long you’ve been a Reader user, Google is now telling you the total number of items you’ve read all time. For me, that number stands at 219,652 over these past (nearly) 5 years. I would have thought that would be pretty impressive, but apparently some people are much higher, because the Reader team notes that there’s a 300,000 limit on their tallies. “Once you hit around 300K (which we know some of you are already over) we stop counting for performance reasons. Consider that ‘beating the game’,” Google notes.

Given my current pace (7,000 read items a month), that means I have about a year left before I beat the game.

One stat Google doesn’t show beyond the past 30 days, but that I’d be really interested in seeing is how my read items have trended over the past few years. I would bet that since the rise of Twitter, it has gone way, way down. RSS still isn’t dead, but with things like Twitter, Facebook, and new sub-tools like Flipboard for the iPad, it is slowly being replaced.

Reader also now shows you the number of items you’ve actually clicked on in the past 30 days. Where was “read” items are ones you’ve scrolled by or clicked to expand in Reader, “clicked” items are ones that you’ve actually clicked on to visit the page.

Update: Just in case you don’t know where to find this data — it’s in the “Trends” area of Google Reader.

To be clear, IE6 isn’t the only browser getting the axe. Firefox 1.0 and 2.0, Safari 2.0 and 3.0, and even Chrome versions 1, 2, and 3 are all being pulled. “This will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers,” Google writes. Again, this will happen June 1.

That’s all understandable, less-so may be the removal of Gears support. Google announced it was killing off Gears support earlier this year mostly because HTML5 has similar capabilities. But those capabilities aren’t ready yet. So instead Google is telling users to download a few different third-party clients.

Google is also opening up commenting a bit further. Until now, you had to be in a sharing group to be able to comment on a post. Now if you can see a shared item, you can comment on it. For users who share publicly, you’ll now get a choice between continuing to share publicly and allowing anyone to comment on your shared items, or switching to protected sharing.

But, as I said, we are getting something in return. A better social experience.

One of about a half dozen tabs that I always have open in my web browser on my desktop or laptop is Google Reader. Even though other sources such as Twitter and Facebook are now better at uncovering news more quickly, Reader remains a great catch-all backup plan for the content I read online. But I’m increasingly finding myself browsing for news on my iPhone. And sadly, all the Google Reader applications that have launched over the past few years have, in my opinion, sucked. And I’m hardly the only one who thinks that. But that changes, today.

An app called Reeder, by Silvio Rizzi, has always been a nice-looking app that syncs with Google Reader. Unfortunately, it has also been clunky, and slow, and lacking some features such as state-saving. But the latest version, 2.0, which just went live in the App Store last night, corrects all the issues I had with it. It’s wonderful. I have absolutely no doubt this will be one of my most-used apps now. In fact, I’m so sure of it, that I’ve already placed it on my the first page of apps on my iPhone screen.

So what makes it so good? Well, first of all, it’s simple. Rather than trying to cram is all of the clutter items that Google Reader itself now crams into its own site, Reeder focuses on three key areas: Unread items, Starred items, and All items. These are the three key areas across the bottom of the app. The only other icon down there (on the main screen) is a reload button to load in new feed items. Assuming you group your feeds into folders in Google Reader, navigation is Reeder focuses on that. So, for example, when I click into my “tech” folder, I see all the unread feed items that have appeared since the last time I opened Google Reader. I can sort these by individual feeds or by time in which the items came in.

Obviously, clicking on an individual story loads that item (including any images). And in the story-view mode you have a new set of options along the bottom that let you mark an item as unread, star it, or a button to load a range of great Reeder features. For example, on this overlay menu, you can make a Google Reader note about an item, you can share it with your Reader friends, you can save it to Instapaper, you can send it to Twitter, you can open it in Safari, you can mail it to someone, etc. There are a half dozen other features which you can customize in the app.

But maybe my favorite feature of Reeder is the Tweetie-like ability to swipe an individual feed item to do something. In Tweetie, when you swipe a tweet, a bunch of options are shown under that tweet. In Reeder, it’s a bit different. Swiping right toggles an item between read and unread status. Swiping left toggles between starred and unstarred status. It’s brilliant. (And yes, there is also a button to mark all as read.)

As you’d expect, Reeder gives you the ability to sync feed items locally so that you can read them when you don’t have an Internet connection, such as on a plane. Previously, as I mentioned, syncing was slow. With version 2.0, syncing speed screams. And, there is also an option to only cache images if you’re connected to WiFi, to keep things moving alone.

If you haven’t been using the iPhone for a long time, news of a great feed reader may sound lackluster to you. After all, it’s been almost two years since the launch of the App Store now, it may be hard to believe that no one has nailed a simple feed reader app yet. But that has been the case. A few are okay, like NetNewsWire and Byline, but none have been great on the level that Tweetie is great as an iPhone Twitter client. In fact, I’d say the best feed reader on the iPhone up until now has been the mobile web version of Google Reader itself. But that too is only good, not great.

With Reeder 2.0, I think we finally have a great iPhone feed reader. Its combination of speed, simplicity, and beauty make it a must-have app in my opinion. Now the only hard part will be waiting for a native iPad version to come out that supports things like dual-pane views to more easily go through feed items on the larger screen. But now I’m just being greedy. I’m just happy to finally have a solid feed reader on the iPhone.

You can find Reeder 2.0 in the App Store here. It’s $2.99.

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.

Google News is testing out a new design, as I reported earlier this month. It includes trending topics on the left and new personalization options. But today someone in the bucket test noticed something different. The sharing options changed. Each story can be shared via email, Google Reader, or Facebook.

Most people won’t see this. It is just in a limited test. But it does suggest that Google is starting to seriously think about ways to drive more sharing of content across the Web. But why push content to Facebook and not to Twitter? And for that matter where is the Google Buzz button?

Of course, sharing to Google Reader is the same as sharing to Buzz (that’s how sharing works on Buzz), but Google should push the Buzz brand here if this feature ever becomes widespread. Google Reader itself has long had many sharing options, including the ability to send posts to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Blogger, and StumbleUpon. It’s about time Google News got better sharing options as well. Currently, the only sharing option is via email.

The fact that Google is testing with Facebook is also interesting, and shows a growing embrace of its social rival. Some Facebook updates are now appearing in Google’s realtime search results. In which Google product will Facebook turn up next?

(Hat tip to @JoeHobot).

Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched.  This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.

Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively.  But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.

You can now chart how different services do against each other on the sharing front via a new services directory on AddThis. For instance, Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5 percent of all AddThis activity.  It even beats Digg (which has 3 percent).  Google Bookmarks is probably used more for personal bookmarking than for social consumption, but it is smack in the middle of Twitter and Digg when it comes to activity via AddThis.

Another comparison is Tumblr versus Posterous, which suggests that Tumblr  is much more popular as a reposting tool, and is about neck-and-neck with WordPress.

The new “Recommended items” feed replaces the “Popular items” feed in the same Explore area. “With the latest round of improvements, we’ve started inserting items selected just for you inside the Recommended items section,” Google writes.

What’s not entirely clear from Google’s post is how they’re pulling together these recommendations for Reader users. I have to assume it’s the same way they’ve long recommended news feeds to you, which is by looking at your Reader Trends and web browsing history (if you have that turned on), and comparing it with other users.

A quick scan of my own new Recommended items area shows results that are pretty hit-or-miss. But maybe that’s because I’m a writer who has to scan hundreds of sites every day even if not all of them particularly interest me.

There’s another small new feature in Reader today too: related feeds. If you trigger the drop down menu on a certain feed, and hover over “More like this,” you’ll see a list of feeds for what Reader considers to be similar sites. Subscribing to them is then just a button click away.

Using Google Reader this past week has been interesting as Google Buzz has multiplied the number of users following the items I share several times over. This is of course because Buzz and Reader (and the other Google properties) share the same social graph now — the same highly controversial social graph which saw you automatically friending certain people you contact on Gmail or over IM. In fact, Google had to stop doing that.

I’m still not sure Reader, or Google as a whole, gets this whole social thing, but they’re certainly growing their graph quickly now.

In case you missed it, Apple announced the long-awaited iPad yesterday. And while there’s been no shortage of coverage by just about every technology-related blog on the planet, perhaps you’d like to be able to use Google Reader without every third post being about the device. If so, there’s a very simple search trick you can use to filter out all the iPad-related hoopla.

Simply type -ipad in Google Reader’s search bar (or just use this direct link) and you’ll be presented with all the news items that don’t contain the word “iPad” anywhere in the title or body. After the results are presented, you can click either the “Expanded” or “List” link in the upper right-hand corner to view your news as you’re used to seeing it on a daily basis. Needless to say, this trick works for any other term as well.

Enjoy.

The new feature certainly livens up Google Reader quite a bit. The only problem now is that you have a lot of feeds, like I do, it’s not exactly easy on the eyes with zillions of colors bombarding your peripheral vision. But hey, no doubt some people will like this, and most importantly, it’s opt-in.

While many of its rivals have been doing favicons for a while, Google Reader was slow to add this. In fact, they only did it after soliciting feedback from their audience for what new things they should add. This feature, not surprisingly, was a popular choice, so one team member built it in their 20% time.

You can activate the favicons in the Subscriptions drop down menu in the left hand column. If you dare.

Update: As former Google Reader team member (and current Thing Labs founder) Jason Shellen notes, favicons have been on the product road map since 2005. Maybe better never than late?

Editor’s note: Today, being a news junkie requires not just the ability to keep up with hundreds of breaking stories a day, but the ability to redistribute those stories to your followers and news sites. To get some insight into the modern news junkie, we asked Mrinal Desai to share with us how he screens the news in the guest post below. Desai is the co-founder of CrossLoop, but some of you may recognize him more from Twitter or Techmeme, where he tips stories every day—580 of those tips have appeared as headlines since the beginning of this year. You can read his last guest post here.

Like many out there, I have been, am and always will be a news addict. For many news junkies, it is the fleeting, current fix of information about a breaking topic that interests them, only to be replaced by the next headline. They jump from headline to headline, forgetting the one they just read as they move on to the next one.

For me personally, news is not only timely information on the current state of affairs but also a way to take a deep dive, to connect analysis and information together and learn through application.  I am looking for insight.  It could be patterns, it could be knowledge about an industry or it could be an opportunity to become introspective and ask questions.

Keeping this in mind, here is a snapshot of my consumption and distribution of news both offline and online.  I’ll divide the way I screen the news by the screens on which it comes to me.

No Screen:

• I don’t start a day without reading The Wall Street Journal in print
• Currently, I get 4 magazines and I go through them on the weekend: The Economist, The Atlantic, Wired and Fortune. Before they stopped, I used to also get Business 2.0 and MIT’s Technology Review.

Screen 1 – MacBook Pro:

Apps: Twitter, Google Reader, Techmeme and a little bit of Facebook

Twitter: I’ve been a user since January 2007.  Its always on for me. I invest a significant amount of time in figuring out who/what to follow based on my interests.  Today this ‘list’ stands at 489. Building this list is a continuous process and it typically consists of people who can teach or inform me of something, news sources and people I respect and with whom I want to build a long term relationship with independent of business. Of this, I have a column/list/group called “Pigeons” (birdie, early days of communication—you get it, right?).  I read each and every tweet of this group. I have about 75 in this group. 15 of my personal favorites, apart from @techcrunch and all those who write for it @techcrunch/team, are:

@bxchen – Technology Reporter, Wired
@148apps – iPhone App Reviews
@msuster – General Partner, GRP Partners
@jennydeluxe – Technology Reporter, The New York Times
@scobleizer – everything social media
@Learmonth – Reporter at Adage
@jasonhiner – Executive Editor at TechRepublic (CBS Interactive)
@leplaporte – Technology Journalist and Broadcaster
@appadvice – Editor, Webware (CBS Interactive)
@taylorbuley – Technology Reporter, Forbes
@sarahintampa – Writer, ReadWriteWeb
@reckless – Nilay Patel, Engadget
@gizmodo – Everything gadgets blog
@dmac1 – Technology reporter, Business Week
@joshk – General Partner, First Round Capital

You can follow them all in one click on the Twitter List I created called “Fifteen“

Screen 2 – iPhone: I have played with a few iPhone news apps, both paid and free.  These include the mobile apps from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times , Byline, Fluent News, News Fuse, BBCReader, NPR News, ReadItLater, ZenNews, and News Pro. I also visit mobile news sites. Being a little glued to Techmeme, I was very excited to see its new mobile version for smartphones—the icon took a spot right away on my home screen:

After experimenting and trying them all out, though, my current favorite native iPhone app is Newsstand (iTunes Link) which stays on my dock. Its a $4.99 app but it does the following extremely well for me:

1. Synchs beautifully with Google Reader and is fast.  It allows me to organize my folders, move them up and down and importantly very easily “Mark all as Read”

Below is a snapshot of my Feeds and a folder creatively named ‘Top News” that I keep a close watch on every day.

2) Newsstand has a lot of social goodness to share through Twitter, Delicious, ReadItLater and Instapaper

What’s Missing:
—bit.ly so that I can track data on the links I share as I do on Tweetie 2 with my API key.
—Sharing on Facebook
—Ability to RT or @respond to my twitter stream that I subscribe to as an RSS feed from within Google Reader.

Before social media, I always shared news via email to specific people. Now I have replaced email with these easy tools:
—Twitthat bookmarklet. One click.
—Twitterbar a Firefox Add-on customized with a prefix. One click.

—Google Reader’s Share is connected to my Twitter account. One click.
—Facebook Share bookmarklet or if I want it all on one place, I recommend Shareaholic.

Screen 3 – TV. I do not get my news here since I watch very little TV.

Screen 4 – eReader
I have a Kindle that I use to read books and have not switched from print to this one yet for news. As you can imagine, I get enough news on my other screens all day and like some time away from it.

Below is a visual of how I personally share news and the tools I use. Everything goes through Twitterfeed as my central hub for news going in and out.  Note that lately I stand undecided between Seesmic and Tweetdeck. (Image courtesy: Zurb, click to enlarge).

I spend a significant amount of money on news—4 print magazines, 2 newspapers with one online and iPhone apps.

The only screen I care about:

• well written analysis
• Unique and timely content/information
• Thought provoking story telling
• “Connection” with the writer—literally or figuratively from a style perspective
• Delivery channel. Find me—the “paperboy route” has changed

How do you screen the news?

But that’s hardly all this update contains. You can also now easily send feed items to a number of places including Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Blogger, and others. To enable any of these, simply go to the “Settings” area of Google Reader and enable the ones you want to use. If the services you want aren’t listed, you can even customize the “Send To” feature to enable sending items just about anywhere.

Another new feature allows you to easily subscribe to feeds owned by people you are contacts with. This is an obvious, but nice addition, as it makes it easier to locate feeds you may be interested in — assuming, of course, that you’re actually interested in the people you follow on Google Reader. This feature also includes Twitter updates, so you can easily import all of those and see that person’s tweets through Google Reader if you don’t feel like scanning Twitter all day.

But the best feature of the bunch may be the ability to have more control over the “Mark all as read” functionality. We all use the “Mark all as read” button when we’re too far behind on our feeds to possibly catch up. But now you can just mark items that older than a day, a week, or two weeks as read, saving the newest ones for you to still be able to read. That’s a great idea.

Google Reader still has some social issues, but it’s hard to argue with any of these features.

The Reader team notes today that it has begun the adoption of PubSubHubbub, starting with the publishing of Shared Items. As you can see in the demo video below, with PubSubHubbub support, when you share an item in Google Reader, it instantaneously shows up on services like FriendFeed (which pull in Reader Shared Items).

While this is just for Shared Items right now, you can imagine that Google Reader will add further support as well in time. It really needs to in order to keep up with the speed at which information is traveling around the web on sites like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.

And while this is a side project by some Google employees (PubSubHubbub) working on a Google application (Google Reader) and shown off on a service started by a bunch of ex-Googlers (FriendFeed), the main idea behind PubSubHubbub goes far beyond that. They want the fully open protocol to be used by all services/sites that work with feed items to make them more real-time. As one of the creators, Brad Fitzpatrick said during our event, “Nothing in the protocol hardcodes Google as the center of the world, I hate that sort of crap too.“

See the FriendFeed demo as well as the CrunchUp demo below.

Darnell is FriendFeed’s first hire in over a year, and will get employee badge number 13. He starts today, and according to the blog post announcing the steal, he’ll be bringing his “ninja-fu data-storage and scalability skills” to the startup.

I was reading Darnell’s blog and I noticed something funny: back in May, he blogged about his experiences playing around with Google App Engine and coming up with FriendFork. The latter is a quick product mashed together to make it easier to consume, indeed, FriendFeed in Google Reader.

(Hat tip to @OurielOhayon)