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Google Reader Asks Us to Play

Written on March 11, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Google Reader Labs is adding a new way to view your feeds—Play. According to the blog announcement, this was conceived as a way to help introduce people to Google Reader—people who “aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up” but are interested in using it. I hope both of you are happy .

But really this layout is primarily designed for people who want to view graphics or video—on autoplay, oh joy—and only a couple lines of any accompanying text. The white-on-black layout works well for showing off images, but not so well for that text.

Plus, to read a full article, you have to click on a “read more” link, which opens the full post within Google Reader Play—so still in the white-on-black layout that’s always so popular among people who read things online:

The layout includes many of the social features of Google Reader—the star, the Like button and the share button (the RSS button on its point). It also has a few settings: hide the thumbnail viewer, use magic layout (I only pushed that button when I had an all-text post up, though, so it didn’t do anything), view settings (All items, New items, Starred items, Liked items or Categories (to view top items in select categories)), or view the images in a post in a slideshow.

While it looks slick, I’m not sure this is going to make it any easier for people to overcome their initial aversions to the setup process—and if they want to, I don’t know, read blogs with Google Reader, they may not be a big fan of Play.

If you want to experiment with Play, you can log in to your Google Reader. View a folder and select View in Reader Play from the folder settings (above the items) or from the drop down:

I’ve tried just going to Google Reader Play, but after letting it load for ten minutes, somehow I doubt I’m going to get anything.

What do you think? Would you like to Play?

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Google Reader Asks Us to Play

Google Reader No Longer Just for RSS Feeds

Written on January 26, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Attend any of my presentations on the topic of competitive intelligence and you’ll hear me recommend various tools for keeping tabs on changes your competitors make to their web pages.

Now, Google Reader has entered the page monitoring business:

For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org’s latest products, just type “http://www.google.org/products.html” into Reader’s “Add a subscription” field. Click “create a feed”, and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

A quick confirmation:

And Google Reader will start alerting you to any changes it discovers on a page.

I’m going to test it out on a few of my competitors web sites and will let you know if it blows the doors of the previous tools I recommended–which I doubt, but who knows.

Oh, and the new feature isn’t just for competitive intelligence. There are a bunch of uses for it, including:

• New coupons are posted to your favorite retailer
• Reputation monitoring for sites that don’t provide RSS feeds
• New real estate listings
• Hard to find items on Craigslist

Any other cool uses you can think of?

Continued here:
Google Reader No Longer Just for RSS Feeds

No Feed, No Problem – Google Reader Now Tracks Any Website Change

Written on January 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

The Google Reader blog announced you can now track changes to any web page, even the ones without RSS feeds.
How does this come in handy? Well, let’s say you want to track when Google changes their webmaster guidelines. All you do is copy the URL into Google Reader and click [...]



….

Originally posted here:
No Feed, No Problem – Google Reader Now Tracks Any Website Change

StumbleUpon Updates Design Again (Abandoning Social Search?)

Written on October 29, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Earlier this month, StumbleUpon started showcasing their new homepage design, when they touted their “Google + Twitter” social search. Now they’ve gone through the rest of the site to make it more consistent (less customizable), easy to understand and streamlined.

Read Write Web reports:

The new interface is streamlined and more social with an updated relationship system. A focus on consistency (e.g., limiting user control of visual elements) and removal of clutter (e.g., presenting tags in a drop-down menu rather than a cloud) characterize the design changes made. Also, a few tweaks to group sharing were made to help reduce share-spam.

The most significant UX changes have occur[r]ed in the way friendships and subscriptions work on the site.

Now, your friends are you “Mutual Subscribers,” which makes the relationship a little clearer. They’re the people users can share pages with directly from the toolbar.

However, the redesign is largely changes like those—clarifying various site functions, streamlining the design, making things easier for users. The homepage, same as the beta featured earlier this month, highlights recent activity from Mutual Subscribers—but doesn’t place a big emphasis on the social search aspect they were talking about earlier this month.

So is StumbleUpon shying away from that? Or are they worried that their core user base was confused? I know I was a little worried when I first hear the social search news—even though I’m now an infrequent Stumbler, I didn’t want to lose that original “discovery engine,” even if it would be for a working social search model. However, the actual stumbling part of the service would remain—and maybe this is just to remind and reassure their users of that.

But it still seems like they haven’t really played up the social search aspect enough. While I remain highly skeptical of social search, it’s one of those brass rings for mainstream search engines—like Google, which announced Social Search in Labs, using sites that your Google contacts have viewed, as well as sites you’ve seen before in your Web History, Google Reader and associated Google services.

However, with StumbleUpon’s more targeted “Mutual Subscribers” option, you have the ability to control what friends you’re getting information from, instead of results from everyone you’ve ever emailed.

What do you think? Does StumbleUpon have a better chance of getting social search right? Is it shying away from that—and should it, now that Google’s officially thrown its hat into the ring?

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StumbleUpon Updates Design Again (Abandoning Social Search?)

Google Reader Adds More Suggestions and MAGIC!

Written on October 23, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

No, seriously, they added magic.

As you’ve probably noticed today, Google Reader has added a few new features. The first is the Explore section, just below the People you follow section. Here, Google shows off two sources of new feeds: Popular Items and Recommended Sources. As you might guess, the Recommended Sources feature analyzes your feeds (via Reader Trends) and Web History to find feeds you might like. (This is the old Recommendations feature.) Popular Items highlights “top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions).” It identifies these items algorithmically (how else?) and sorts them in the order they think you’ll like them.

The magic isn’t just in the mind reading, however. It’s also in the feed settings: now we can order items by newest, oldest or . . . magic.

The Magic setting orders items by our Reader activities and preferences Reader has observed. The more we like or share items in our feeds, the better the magic gets.

Like al of Google’s personalization features, these are based on our usage history. But how long until privacy advocates speak out against these developments? What do you think?

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Google Reader Adds More Suggestions and MAGIC!

Google Translate: Now for YOUR Website

Written on October 1, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Google has long been working on their machine translation offerings. Over last year, they’ve added translation services to Google Reader, Google Toolbar, and Google Docs. And now they’re bringing their translation skillz to you—on your website.

Google announced a new translation widget on Monday, bringing Google Translate to any site. Insert a short script—a mere snippet of code—and users visiting your site will be prompted to translate it into their own language:

Google acknowledges that there are some limitations to their power translations:

Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, it’s not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation.

Thank you for your humility, Google (even though in our tests, we’ve seen that sometimes we can’t even get the gist of the translated text). Fifty-one languages are available in Google Translate.

What do you think? Will you use Google Translate for your site? Do you use any other translation products?

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Google Translate: Now for YOUR Website

Social Media: Total Copycats

Written on September 11, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Is it just me, or does it seem like every time one social media service comes up with a cool feature, it’s only a matter of time before every other site copies it, and there are no cool new features left? This time, Facebook is copying Twitter (yet again) and YouTube is copying Facebook.

YouTube’s latest feature will suggest friends in a “People you may know” box on the homepage (just like Facebook! *fake surprise*). The official blog announcement says that the friend suggestions will come from email addresses you’ve sent videos to (using YouTube’s email feature, not just your email account)—and your Gmail contacts, if your Gmail and YouTube accounts are linked.

Great. We just loved it when you did this in Gmail, and then Google Reader, but now you’re sharing the email addresses of anyone I’ve ever contacted with the rest of your services? How many times do I have to tell you that an email does not a relationship make? (Note you can opt out of allowing anyone with your email address from friending you in your YouTube privacy settings.)

Facebook’s not going to lay down and take this plagiarism. Oh no. They’re going to copy one of the most popular features on Twitter (since they’ve already co-opted the status updates and streamlined their interface to show only the updates)—@ tagging.

Tagging photos, videos, and notes has long been a popular feature of Facebook. But the new system uses the @ sign, popularized as a way of mentioning friends by Twitter, to make tagging even easier:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

So it’s not just like Twitter’s system—but come on, where do you think they got this idea?

Facebook says the new feature is rolling out over the next couple weeks and will eventually work into applications, too. As with other tags, you can untag yourself from others’ posts.

What do you think? Is Facebook (and YouTube) ripping off Twitter (and Facebook)? Of is this kind of copycatting expected with innovation?

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Social Media: Total Copycats

Pay No Attention to the WordPress Hacking Threats; Look at the Shiny rssCloud!

Written on September 8, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

What would you rather have? A safe, secure WordPress platform that doesn’t require a half-dozen plugins in order to run effectively, or, faster distribution of your RSS feed?

If, like me, your vote went to option A, then you’re probably not going to be too thrilled about the latest update from the WordPress mothership. If you drooled over option B, then you’re probably a big geek and will need a change of underwear when you see what WordPress has in store for you.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg just flicked the switch on rssCloud–or RSS Cloud, or RSSCloud, take your pick–which means 7.5 million blogs now have the capability to push out updates in real time.

Why is this important? Right now how most people interact with feeds is by checking that it updated every now and then, usually about once an hour. Can you imagine waiting an hour to get your emails? (The world would probably be more productive.) RSS Cloud is an extra element in your RSS feed that allows subscribers to say “Hey, let me know as soon as you’ve updated, kthx.”

The only problem is that there’s only one RSS reader that currently supports rssCloud–and it ain’t Google Reader! So, while the future looks bright–and fast–the announcement is pretty superficial. Unless you consider it a slight of hand.

Slight of hand? That’s what my good friend @Ed suggests over at Twitter:

As you can see, he’s responding to the comments from another good friend of mine–and self-appointed Twitter conscience–@GrayWolf, who’s somewhat annoyed that WordPress would roll out an update that is both a) not immediately beneficial, and b) not a high priority for many WordPress users.

I have to agree with him. While the timing may or may not be designed to take the heat of yet more hacking threats to WordPress.org users, I’m somewhat frustrated that WordPress lacks many basic features and continues to suffer attack after attack.

So, what about you? I’m sure this post will get on Matt Mullenweg’s radar, so leave a comment and let him know what you think WordPress should make a priority.

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Pay No Attention to the WordPress Hacking Threats; Look at the Shiny rssCloud!

Google Docs Adds Translation

Written on August 28, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Google continues to work on its machine translation—both the quality of the translations and the number of their products using it. In the last year, they’ve added translation to the Google Toolbar and Google Reader, and now Google Docs joins the translating fold.

To translate a document into one of the 42 offered languages, open it and go to Tools>Translate document.

In the official announcement on the Google Blog, Associate Product Manager Intern Rita Chen recognizes that machine translation still has a long way to go. However, I’m happy to report that there have been some improvements, at least since Google Reader got its translation feature.

I used a bilingual blog to test GR’s translator. I took the translated posts to compare the translation quality:

Obviously, there is still a long way to go to get machine translation, but the last nine months have shown at least a little improvement in the automatic translation.

But here’s the real question: can you understand this translation?

On Friday the paper would not normally go up in the afternoon because I work different hours. People on the bus tends to be younger, most students who go to the campus of the University of Washington. ¶ While he was on the bus I thought about doing this drawing bad luck that Halloween has fallen on a Friday this year. I missed the trick or treating with my kids. My consolation is that at home we seem to be on Halloween from a month ago, when my child who is 3 years old, began to get all their costumes all hours of the day: bee, dragon and tiger, which is the that was the end. My child, who is 5 years old, disguised himself as a Transformer, which is called Optimus Prime. (Gabriel Campanario’s original English version)

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Google Docs Adds Translation

What Do the Big Names Read? Google Will Tell You

Written on August 26, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

Ever wonder what exactly some of the biggest names in most anything read? Are they looking somewhere that we are not and that’s how they got big? While you may not have thought about it, now that you are thinking along those lines it might interesting to see just what these folks do keep up with, right?. Google Reader has added to its Power Reader offering so you can do just that. Google reached out to some ‘important’ folks to get a window into how they keep up to date. In the Official Google blog we learn that

We received lots of great responses, which we’ve collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we’ve expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader.

Thankfully, Google decided to move beyond politics (stop the spin I want to get off!). While the lists are not very deep (just about 25 folks in total ….. and WHAT? ….. no Andy Beal? The list is obviously flawed ). It includes the likes of Chris Anderson, Michelle Malkin and others from various areas that I didn’t know were important people. Of course, if you ask anyone who knows me, they will quickly tell you that if it doesn’t involve a ball, puck or other projectiles I probably wouldn’t know about it anyway.

As a sample here is what Nicholas Kristof, Op-ed columnist of the New York Times is checking out.

So go to where the Google anointed smart folks are and help Google Reader in the process. That’s the point of all of this anyway, right?

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What Do the Big Names Read? Google Will Tell You