The web is always been poised to grow. (Duh.) And as a second order effect the amount of information available through feeds seems likely to overwhelm the casual onlooker despite its being potentially useful for them. A (currently) smallish cross-vendor community has been adept at making tools for managing this incredible volume of data available for everyone for years and at Google we're interested in helping out with the resources available to us.at the same time ...
So we (Google) have launched a service called Reader as an experiment on Google Labs. Reader has been the fascination of a group of developers who were interested in building feed readers and I'm just happy to have been involved so please bear with the occasional confessional-letter cadence since "I never thought these letters were real until...'" can sound silly to anyone who isn't actually the surprised person in question.Screenshots of Google Reader. You probably know the drill, click to enlarge.The main window:Your starred items:A podcast showing the audio player:With the drawer open and editing a feed:With the drawer open, browsing subscriptions and labels.The gist? It's clear that there's value in keeping up with web content by subscribing to feeds. But the promise of this technology seems greater than, say, the attention paid to its admittedly excellent ability to manage news updates and it's been clear that developers who have been working with RSS, Atom, and microformats have understood that syndication can perhaps be compared favorably, and superficially, to bricks-and-mortar efforts like bridge, dam or canalbuilding. (For additional metaphoric conflation I'd been considering mentioning the Yangtse River's Three Gorges Dam project to highlight engineering designs for managing floods. Aren't you glad I didn't?)for them. A (currently) smallish cross-vendor community has beenadept at making tools for managing this incredible volume of dataavailable for everyone for years and at Google we\'re interested inhelping out with the resources available to us.So we\'re experimenting with ways to do this. Thankfully, we\'re notalone - and personally I\'m just happy everyone involved (Yahoo!,Microsoft, Ask, thousands of independent developers) seems to befocused on helping lower the barrier to entry for making feeds useful.If you\'re interested in making Reader better, let us know as we planon keeping the experiment alive and kicking for as long as there isstuff being syndicated.And, because I rarely get a forum like this, I\'d like to thank Google,particularly Evan and Blogger and many others here for taking a chanceon me. And Flickr and Scott and Doug for pushing the web UI envelopetime and again. And Shellen for making this happen. And for theReader team for countless sacrifices recently.Awright. Please give Reader a try. For a quick introduction, you canlook at my starred items. Please note that "still waters, runningdeep" isn\'t me and that I very much keep my item pool filled with theentertaining snark of Gawker and the techno-fetishism of Engadget.You who better understand the potential of this technology and live inthe United States might prefer to subscribe to the Amber Alerts feed.The latter use stands a better chance of actually be involved in thebetterment of humankind though I\'m presuming (and perhaps unfairly)that Gawker isn\'t planning to add child rescue to its media mission.(I shouldn\'t be hasty. Who knows?) The presumption here is entirelymy own and should not be attributed to my bosses, the Overlords. (Mypet name.)One known issue among many: You can\'t yet search through your itemsin this version. And if you\'re curious if we\'re aware of the irony,well I\'d like to offer that you can consider yourself apprised.Sincerely and with thanks,",1] ); //-->The web is always been poised to grow. (Duh.) And as a second order effect the amount of information available through feeds seems likely to overwhelm the casual onlooker despite its being potentially useful for them. A (currently) smallish cross-vendor community has been adept at making tools for managing this incredible volume of data available for everyone for years and at Google we're interested in helping out with the resources available to us.at the same time ...
