<story><title>My offer to Google Reader</title><url>http://fury.com/2011/11/my-offer-to-google-reader/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>confusedreader</author><text>Maybe I&apos;m missing something, but I don&apos;t really understand the huge community backlash to the Reader rework. I spend hours in reader every day, and it wasn&apos;t until they added in G+ that it actually became easy to share.The addition made it so I could share within a community I was already involved in rather then a few people in some disconnected Reader community. From my perspective they actually removed the useless and unnecessary functions that made the old reader impossible to use to actually share content. I see it as a good first step, and when G+ actually has a solid API to build upon, they can evolve Reader to use it.&lt;p&gt;Also, rabble rabble rabble too much white space rabble rabble rabble. I tried some of the community created userscripts to see if the &quot;UI improvements&quot; people were making actually helped and in the large part they don&apos;t as the people writing them don&apos;t seem to understand UI design.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jamiecon</author><text>Normally I&apos;m the person who makes this type of comment. I&apos;m not a fan of resistance to change, or contrariness in general - especially the particularly annoying and overly dramatic Internet Blogger brands.&lt;p&gt;However for me the crucial missing feature is being able to view and comment on your friends&apos; shared items within Reader.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m completely OK with Google requiring me to have a Google+ account, and see the sense in the merging of the two &apos;social networks&apos;. I&apos;m also fine with my shares appearing on Google+. I&apos;m happy to configure a Circle to handle my shares.&lt;p&gt;But there&apos;s no way for me to read the items that my friends who are Google Reader users have shared _within_ Reader, as either individual or merged RSS feeds. This is something I used to be able to do, and now I can&apos;t - with no replacement.&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s why the backlash is justified in this case.&lt;p&gt;PS - Google you could make me happy just by having a &apos;Friends shared items&apos; menu item which aggregates Google+ shares from Reader. That&apos;s all it would take.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ll have fond memories of pressing &apos;Shift + S&apos;, C, and typing a message to a small group of mates for a while though. Those were the days!</text></comment>
<story><title>My offer to Google Reader</title><url>http://fury.com/2011/11/my-offer-to-google-reader/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>confusedreader</author><text>Maybe I&apos;m missing something, but I don&apos;t really understand the huge community backlash to the Reader rework. I spend hours in reader every day, and it wasn&apos;t until they added in G+ that it actually became easy to share.The addition made it so I could share within a community I was already involved in rather then a few people in some disconnected Reader community. From my perspective they actually removed the useless and unnecessary functions that made the old reader impossible to use to actually share content. I see it as a good first step, and when G+ actually has a solid API to build upon, they can evolve Reader to use it.&lt;p&gt;Also, rabble rabble rabble too much white space rabble rabble rabble. I tried some of the community created userscripts to see if the &quot;UI improvements&quot; people were making actually helped and in the large part they don&apos;t as the people writing them don&apos;t seem to understand UI design.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joebadmo</author><text>I agree that the backlash is partly just aversion to change, and partly the fact that we&apos;re in a usability canyon because of the transition, but that the integration with the G+ sharing model means a better, more granular future for sharing, which is good.&lt;p&gt;I wrote a whole post defending the change here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the-new-google-reader&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the visual design, I hope they&apos;ll take cues from the Gmail redesign, which hit a really great balance between clean whitespace-full minimalism and density configurability.</text></comment>