After our big launch of the new look and feel, the Reader team took a breather and worked on tying up loose ends (don’t worry, we also took some time off). We’ve just pushed a new release that includes the following set of fixes and tweaks:
Improvements to our rich mobile interface for iPhone, Android and other browsers, including a more compact page header, visual alignment tweaks and a faster loading time.
Links on the home page giving you easy access to your recently read and kept unread items.
Fixes for some “stuck” unread count issues.
Better handling of feeds and items with malformed URLs.
Less flickering when using the “Share with note” bookmark.
Fixing of errors when deleting lots of tags and folders.
Removal of extra image and backend requests, resulting in slightly faster loading times.
One other recent change is that we’re now on Twitter. We’ve been fans of Twitter Search as a way of gathering feedback, but now we have a way of talking back. Feel free to send an @googlereader tweet to get our attention, and follow us for updates and quips.
Finally, we were honored to be nominated for a Bloggie. We encourage you to take a look at all the nominees in all the categories, it’s a collection of some really great, subscribe-worthy, blogs
As many of you know, since becoming a part of Google in June of 2007, the FeedBurner team has been hard at work transforming FeedBurner into a service that uses the same underlying architecture as many other Google applications, running in the same high-volume datacenters. As a team, we chose this path for one reason: our highest priority is making sure your feed is served as fast as possible after you update your content, and is as close as technically possible to being available 100% of the time.
As many of you also know, a month ago we opened up ability for all AdSense publishers to move to this new platform, and just a few days ago made this move available to all FeedBurner publishers. What many of you do not know is that we have been carefully moving publishers for about six months now, looking hard at traffic patterns, debugging issues with these account transfers with publishers and their hosting and service providers, and working with many of our partners (including many other teams at Google) who run feed aggregation platforms to ensure feeds from this new platform are polled and distributed as fast and reliably as possible. (One example: we moved over 100 external Google blogs and their respective FeedBurner feeds over to the new platform as soon as we could; charity (and bug-fixing) begins at home!)
We are very aware of our responsibility to the RSS ecosystem. We are aware we host and provide service to not only some of the largest publishers, but also the feed for your site, the feeds that you rely on for mission-critical news and information, and even some feeds government provides to distribute information on a timely basis to their citizens. We know that many of you run businesses that critically depend on your feed being delivered quickly and reliably, and thus have been working with many of you to ensure that these feeds are delivered in tandem with a monetization solution that allows you to continue business as we go through this transition. FeedBurner has the privilege of serving millions of feeds globally that represent an incredibly wide spectrum of content.
It is this scale however, that makes our transition to Google’s platform technically complex, and as we have started to open up account transfers to all users, it has also amplified the permutations of publisher web server configs, service providers, feed readers, search engines, and so on, and so on. We want to ensure that the time we spend tackling this technical complexity is not mistaken for lack of urgency, concern, or priority.
Just as an example, we are aware and have been working on a known issue of returning a “502 Error” or “503 Error” when checking for updates after certain feeds are migrated. This is a very general error message, representing a number of underlying issues, but in many cases it is a service provider throttling or disallowing traffic from Google. Although we came across many of these issues during our testing phase, in reality we knew a lot of these challenges would not fully surface until we released at scale, which we now have and are dealing with as high priority issues within Google.
To help communicate these issues and resolutions much more effectively, we have created a new blog and feed that you can subscribe to during this transition period. We plan to keep these around as long as necessary. We may also add features to the site that allow you to report your own feed issue details.
The extended team — including both original team members of FeedBurner, newer team members that joined us since we’ve been at Google, and the rest of Google — is excited about our future on this new integrated-with-Google platform that all publishers will be on at the conclusion of this account transfer process. We are excited because we see the potential for scale and innovation on this platform that will make for a true next generation feed management solution. Most of all, however, we are excited about getting publishers excited for these possibilities as we reveal what we have in store.
Posted by Steve Olechowski – Product Manager, AdSense for feeds
Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager Until today, when you wanted to add Google Custom Search to your site, you had to head directly to our Custom Search Engine site. Although creating your own Google-powered search engine only takes a few minutes, we thought it might be easier if we delivered this functionality right to where many of you manage your sites online. Choice is a beautiful thing.
If you own a website hosted on IPOWER, StartLogic, PowWeb, FatCow, BizLand, EasyCGI and several other web hosting providers, you can now configure Custom Search right in your hoster’s management console – these hosters now support both Webmaster Tools and Custom Search. It’s like having pizza delivered to your door instead of having to drive over to the pizza parlour!
When you sign up for the service, you get the following benefits, all from the comfort of your hoster’s control panel:
a Google account is automatically created for you – you don’t have to remember additional passwords or login to use these Google services
you can generate search engines for your websites by simply identifying your domains
shortcuts are provided to manage your Webmaster Tools account and your Custom Search Engines
Sitemaps for URLs on your sites can be automatically submitted to Webmaster Tools for better indexing on Google.com
your Custom Search engines will automatically recognize and use the submitted Sitemaps for enhanced indexing coverage
you can make money by associating your Adsense publisher ID with your search engines and sharing advertising revenue with Google
you can upgrade your search engines to use Site Search for further control over branding, presentation (via XML results) and On-Demand indexing
If your site is hosted by one of the above providers, give it a try – go to your hoster’s console and add a search box to your site if you don’t already have one. High quality search improves user experience, and also directly increases user engagement and improves conversions on web sites.
Additionally, let us know if there are things about this integrated service offering that we can improve. Our programmer’s guide provides more details about the new Custom Search APIs that allow programmatic creation and management of Custom Search engines. If you are a web site hoster interested in incorporating these Google webmaster services into your platform, please contact us.
If you’ve been knocking about within FeedBurner using your Google Account, you may have noticed that the original “french fry” chart from the Analyze tab of the original feedburner.com is no more. This venerable bar chart, with its green picket fence of subscriber trend results, has been the first stop for many publishers when checking their feed analytics for years. In its place is new green-ness (and blue-ness) that communicates three times as much information in the same space, and sets the stage for more interesting reporting in the future. Here’s a snapshot:
This 30-day view now offers the following information:
The relationship between these two numbers over time
You can move the mouse over any day in the chart and see that day’s specific totals for subscribers and reach, too. (Note that reach and subscribers are plotted with different y-axes: subscribers on left, reach on right).
The relationship between these numbers is the kicker:
Understanding that reach means people taking action by viewing or clicking on items in your feed helps you understand how engaged your audience is.
The more often you post (especially with full text), the more often people are likely to view your current (and previous) updates, and even click-through to your site for related information.
Note the blue spikes in reach above; these are centered around new posts. Steady subscriber growth occurred as this site promoted and redirected 100% of its original feed traffic to its feed.
Don’t forget to click the “See more about your subscribers” link below the main chart to view a detailed breakdown of your subscriber traffic:
Comparing this chart, day by day, can help you spot where subscribers are coming from (and from what source they have gone missing, should there be a sudden drop).
While we’re on the topic: make sure you can actually get the reach statistic — meaning, make sure you turn on item-level stats for your feed! They’re used to help calculate reach. Visit the Analyze tab, look for the “Configure Stats” option, and make sure the boxes shown below are checked:
(You can, of course, check “downloads,” too, if you’re a podcaster). As a reminder: to view all feed stats’ reports and options, either click the “View Feed Stats” next to your feed’s ad unit listing in the AdSense Manage Ads section, or sign into feedburner.google.com and click on your feed’s title on My Feeds.
— Jessie Chavez, Software Engineer, and Matt Shobe, User Experience Designer, AdSense for feeds
By Nicholas Jitkoff and Dave MacLachlan, Google Mac Team
One of our goals at Google is to make your search experience as fluid as possible. While much of our work is focused on Google.com, we’re trying to make it just as easy to search outside your browser.
For the last year, we have been working on a new, open-source quick search box. Today, we are releasing our first developer preview for the Mac.
This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come.
If you are interested in participating in our experiment, head over to the Google Code site and give it a try. We are eager to involve users in the development process and will be posting new builds frequently. Over the coming months we’ll be posting a few articles about the architecture and interaction we are exploring, and we look forward to your feedback.
With several Twitter fans on the Blogger team (not to mention a number of Blogger alumni work at Twitter), it seemed only natural that we set up shop on Twitter ourselves. We will be posting status updates, major feature announcements, and pointers to cool uses of Blogger will all show up in our Twitter account. We will do our best to keep an eye on replies to @blogger as well, but our Help Center and Blogger Discussion Group remain the best places for help from fellow users as well as the Blogger support team.
In addition to the Earth Surfer application, our Macworld booth also features a YouTube Upload Booth this year. Several famed YouTubers stopped in the booth and used Quick Capture to upload their videos to the web. For instance…
Have you ever had a friend or family member who you know would love using Google Reader? Have you ever had trouble explaining to that same friend or family member just how using Reader could make their lives easier (and more fun)? We sure have, so if you’re anything like us then we have some useful tools in store for you.
Feel free to let us know what you think by commenting on the videos or by leaving feedback in our Help Forum. Although the videos are aimed at beginners, we’re hoping to eventually cover even more advanced and lesser-known features in the same visual and step-by-step manner.
Now get watching, Readers! And don’t forget to send the link along to your favorite beginner, newbie, or visual learner!
This year for Macworld a Google engineer, David Phillip Oster, wrote a fun application that allows you to surf through Google earth. Watch the video below and read more about it on the Google Lat Long blog.
FeedBurner’s email service began delivering updates in April, 2006. The launch was just weeks after scientists determined email and feeds could be safely combined in a laboratory setting. Our public service has since delivered millions of messages on behalf of thousands of publishers, making sure that publishers who want to get the word out can reach the broadest audience possible — including many site visitors who don’t already embrace feeds (or feed readers, like Google Reader), but who trust their email inboxes to be the best way to have content that matters most delivered to them.
As part of our move to Google infrastructure, FeedBurner has added some new features for email publishers. Most of these are of the under-the-hood variety, but a new set of subscriber list management features will be especially beneficial for publishers with dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of existing email subscribers. Here are features live today for all feeds managed through a Google account:
Added reliability and delivery scale, thanks to Google infrastructure. The same systems that handle Gmail and other, large-scale public email communications traffic now deliver FeedBurner email subscriptions, too.
Robust subscriber list search and pagination. Instead of loading your entire subscriber list, which is too much for some browsers to handle if that list is really big, the new service displays just the 150 most recent subscribers. You can search for specific addresses or general domains (e.g., “hotmail.com” will return a list and total count of your subscribers with “hotmail.com” in their addresses.) This list is now paginated to allow you to scroll through its contents easily.
Complete subscriber list export. Want to view the whole shebang offline? Download a CSV-formatted text file of your entire subscriber list.
These new features are in addition to FeedBurner’s classic email capabilities. As always, you may:
Customize delivery time frame and time zone
Write your own welcome/activation email text
Choose from multiple custom font, size, and color combinations
Incorporate a custom graphic logo in your HTML message header
Also, new subscribers are still required to confirm their requests (to minimize potential abuse).
Want to use the free email delivery service with your feed? Using the latest improvements to email requires moving your existing feedburner.com account to Google (if you haven’t done so already). If you use AdSense, any feeds you set up to use AdSense for feeds will also include ads in emails delivered with this service. Sign in to your AdSense account, click AdSense Setup, then Manage Ads, and then locate an AdSense for feeds unit you have created. Click the “View Feed Stats” link next to this unit to reach your feed’s Analyze page. Click the Publicize tab, then Email Subscriptions to view and set up service options. Email subscriptions will be delivered, using your settings, starting with your feed’s next update. (If your Google account is already set up to use FeedBurner, you can also get to the “Email Subscriptions” service setup area by signing directly in to feedburner.google.com, clicking your feed’s title on My Feeds, and then visiting Publicize > Email Subscriptions.)
Posted by Matt Shobe, User Experience Designer, AdSense for Feeds
