Today we’re rolling out the new Reader design, and the Google+ features that we mentioned just over a week ago. Before the day’s over, all Reader users will be able to enjoy the following improvements:

• A new look and feel that’s cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at.

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In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s…

Today we’re excited to announce some updates to the official Google Reader app for Android. Over the last couple of months, we’ve added some of your most-requested features:

Unread count widget – choose any feed, label, person, or “all items” and get the unread count on your home screen. Clicking on the widget takes you to straight to that stream.

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• Unread count widget – choose any feed, label, person, or “all items” and get the unread count on your home screen. Clicking on the widget takes you to straight to that stream.
• News ticker widget – if you prefer a bit more information, you can add a larger size widget that cycles through items on any stream you want in Reader. Clicking any headline will take you to the article, while

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Additionally, you can now moderate comments within Reader. If the conversation is on an item that you shared, you have the option to remove comments directly. For all conversations,…

The app supports all the basics you’d expect like unread counts, friends, sharing, liking, and starring, but it also has a whole lot more, including:

• Multiple accounts
• Synced preferences
• Full subscription features (subscribe and search from your phone)
• Search

A couple harder to discover features we’d like to highlight:

• Volume-key navigation: if you enable this in the settings, you can navigate

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Google Apps is Google’s suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration apps used by over 30 million users in small businesses, large enterprises, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world. If your organization hasn’t gone Google yet you can learn more about how to lower IT costs and improve productivity and collaboration at…

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes — and as always, please feel free to visit our help forum if you have any questions.

Update: You can use the Page2RSS transition tool to convert your feeds here: http://grtransition.page2rss.com/

We know that nothing will be quite like Bloglines in the hearts of its users, but if you’re looking for another online feed reader, we encourage you to give Reader a shot. All you need is a Google account (you already have one if you use Gmail) — and here’s a video to help you get started. It’s also very easy to bring your Bloglines…

Eagle-eyed viewers might have also noticed we’ve added a new category to the trends page: clicked trends – now you can see which sources you click on the most.
And finally, something…

Last year we announced that we wanted to hear your wish list for features in Google Reader, and one of most highly requested features was the ability to rename folders and tags. Today we are rolling out this feature with a little bit of Polish help from Krakow.

You can rename folders and tags on the settings page:

And you can also edit these names right from the contextual menu in your subscription list.

Also,…

Simplifying comments

Ever since we launched support for comments on shared items, one of the most frequent points of confusion has been “who can comment on my shared items?” (or rather, “why can’t I comment on my friends’ shared items?”). Up until now, someone had to be in a designated sharing group to be able to comment…

Oh wait, not that kind of Polish, this kind of polish.

As we’ve often done in the past, the Reader team has taken the time between major releases to work on small features and bug fixes. Here’s a round-up of the changes we’ve made over the past month:

We’ve added support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags, so that when you come across an awesome…

A few stats about the badge submissions:

• 13% of people who requested a badge ended up way over our “Totally Sweet” threshold of 314,159 items read…
• 25% of you were Platinum (133,700

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After the conference, several of us felt like shirts didn’t seem…

The more eagle-eyed Reader users have noticed a few tweaks being made to Reader’s mobile interface over the past few days:

• We’ve brought over a few more features from the desktop version of Reader: magic ranking and search. Both can be found in the option drop-down menu.
• For better consistency with the desktop version, we’ve made the titles of items be links to the original page
• The top

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Long time readers of our blog will note that we occasionally throw in links to crazy, interesting, and fun items in our posts. You may be wondering, “How can I find such interesting content to share?” Today we’re launching two new features that are designed to help you do just that:

• Recommended items get personal – When we launched Popular items many of you wanted to see even more personalized recommendations. With the latest round of improvements, we’ve started inserting items selected just for you inside the Recommended items section. This is great if

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However, even with all these great features, sharing has been mostly limited to the subset of your friends who use Google Reader. While many people use Reader, we know that even more use Gmail. That’s why today, we’re thrilled to announce that with…

Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we’re rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don’t…

We know that many of you like to take Reader with you wherever you go, so today we are updating our mobile interface by adding a few new features along with a new streamlined look.

New mobile features include support for “liking”, tagging, and sorting feeds by oldest/newest. These are all features that were previously only available on the web interface, and we’ve worked to get them into the mobile version as quickly as possible.

As far as streamlining goes, we’ve made a few improvements to give you more features with less clutter. First, we redesigned the bottom…

Let us know how you like the extension (and what other features…

We realize that not everyone wants their subscription list to turn into a multi-colored extravaganza, so we’ve made it into a setting that you can access from your subscriptions menu.

Be on the lookout for more ideas being implemented, and feel free to let us know how you like this feature on Twitter or in our help forum.

Today, we’re launching two changes to Google Reader to help you discover more interesting content faster. Just as the launch of Personalized Search improved search results based on your search history, these changes use your Reader Trends to improve your reading experience.

• Explore section – We’re always trying to help you discover new stuff in Reader, and today we’re introducing “Popular items” and “Recommended sources”, two ways to find interesting content from all over the Internet. We use algorithms to find top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your

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Have you ever had an idea that would make Google Reader better, more efficient, or just more fun to use? Using Product Ideas, you can submit your idea as well as read…