We all lose now that Google shut down open RSS sharing from Reader

Late this afternoon, Google finally flipped the switch and turned off the integrated “Shared Items” link blogs In Google Reader. Now, Reader automatically shares to Google Plus, a walled-garden social network for nerds. Where once Google embraced standards like RSS, Reader’s shares are now held captive. Lots of folks are not happy about this.

What Changed in Google Reader?

Before: The "Share" toggle was a curated RSS feed of good stuff to read

My big gripe: Google removed the rarely-used but much-loved “shared items” feature and swapped in the Google Plus social network in its place. Although old shared items feeds are still accessible (here’s mine!), they are hidden away and apparently can no longer be modified.

After: +1 is Google's Roach Motel, with only "Send to" remaining

The “Send to” feature remains, but this is a script initiation rather than a toggle like “Share” or “+1”. And “Send to” doesn’t appear in Mobile Reader – only “+1″. So my frequent on-the-go reading and sharing is gone, too.

And you can’t subscribe to your friends’ shared items anymore – you have to read them on Google Plus. Remember, Google Reader is all about RSS. That’s what it is. So removing RSS creation from Reader is inexcusable! If I can’t curate an RSS feed, I’m now left with half a network. It’s consume-only in terms of RSS, with all content curation and creation shifted to Google Plus.

Also gone are public tags, which some folks used and loved, as well as discussions, which were mostly silent. And the blog widget and bookmarklet are now non-functional.

Google also gave the interface the “white-out” treatment, draining it of color like a Halloween vampire. The new interface is so sparse, with exaggerated white space and tiny bold fonts, that my eyes have trouble scanning and reading. Even compared with Google Plus, the new Reader is ugly.

Why This Change Matters

No thanks, Google. Give me back an RSS feed of shares!

Let me repeat what I said above: Google Reader is a social network built on RSS. and it’s just been cut in half. Rather than reading and sharing, Reader is now just an RSS reader application. And even the reading part is emasculated: You can only read site RSS, and since you can’t subscribe to friends’ shared items anymore (’cause they don’t exist). Your readership of others’ “likes” will shift to Plus and its inferior and bloated experience.

In other words, the new Google Reader is nothing more than a static RSS reader in a browser. It used to be much more than this: Reader was my main blog reader, and the first application I went to in the morning. Now it’s much less – Google went backward.

Since there’s no API or RSS feed for Plus shares, Google has created a “Roach Motel” instead of a social network: Likes check in but they can’t check out! Reader’s main sharing feature is a one-way pipe into Google Plus, reducing the value of Reader itself. And there’s no way to automatically “circle” the people you used to follow. They’re just gone.

Alternatives to Plus

Of course, there’s still “Send to”, Google’s customizable sharing feature in Reader. And it’s quite possible to use that to send “likes” to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook. But “Send to” is a “click-hunt-click” experience in the browser, and it’s not available in the mobile version.

A better alternative is to stop using Reader and move to some other application. The problem is that these only allow you to share outward: If you’re interested in continuing to follow the shares of others, you’re out of luck. Most will likely adapt to sharing on Plus only, and those shares are walled off inside Google’s private world.

Unless someone comes up with a workable alternative, or until Google adds RSS or a worthwhile API to Plus, we’re all sunk. And we’re all poorer for it. Thanks, Google.

Stephen’s Stance

I’m not whining and crying because Google broke something I love. I’m upset because Google redirected a vibrant world of sharing into their own walled garden with no way to escape. This move effectively captures the fraternity of Reader sharers and firmly directs them to Google Plus for sharing and commenting. Sure, the new Reader is ugly and features are reduced generally. But the elimination of the sharing and reading feedback loop is a real loss to Internet users.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Google Reader’s Roach Motel “Un-Friends” the Internet
This post was categorized as Apple, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Insta-What?

Instapaper is a mash-up of social web bookmarking, readability and reformatting, and offline reading. It is an “ecosystem” product consisting of the instapaper.com web site, browser bookmarklets and an integration API, and (optional) reader apps for Apple’s mobile iPhone platforms, including a special iPad version. Instapaper users simply submit items they want to read later to the server and can later come back to them on the web site or in the reader apps.

In practice, Instapaper is much more valuable than it sounds. Web fanatics have famously-short attention spans. Folks like me devour online information, cruising through hundreds of RSS feeds, jumping from site to site, and all the while discovering valuable information. Uncovering gems isn’t the problem when so much great content is added to the web every day.

The primary issue is taking time to read, ponder, and act on what we find, and Instapaper helps me do just that. As I work my way through the continual stream of information I encounter, I use the Instapaper bookmarklet and Google Reader’s Starred Items capability to flag the top content for later. I can then go back and properly focus on these when I have time, whether using the computer at my desk, the iPad by the couch, or the iPhone wherever I am. This simple app has allowed me to extract much more value from the web!

Instapaper Integration

Like the best tools, Instapaper doesn’t try to do everything, but it does enough. In order to tag for later, I need it to be present wherever I encounter good content, and Instapaper is there:

1. I’ve installed the simple Instapaper Bookmarklet in the Safari web browser on my Macs, so I can send anything I find to Instapaper for later.
2. Although it was a bit more complicated, I also installed the Instapaper Bookmarklet in Safari on my iPhone and iPad.
3. Although the stated Google Reader functionality (using the bookmarklet) didn’t work reliably, I managed to get Instapaper synced with my Starred Items feed. See below for instructions!
4. My favorite mobile Twitter apps (Twitter for iPhone and Twitterific for iPad) both support Instapaper tagging, and Twitter for iPhone can even use the readability-enhancing “mobilizer” rendering capability of Instapaper rather than Google’s less-functional mobilizer.
5. In a pinch, I can also email links to a special address.

This comprehensive support means that, no matter where I am, Instapaper is ready.

Twitter for iPhone can "mobilize" web pages with Instapaper or submit them to "Read Later"

Pulling Google Reader Starred Items Into Instapaper

One of the neatest tricks added to the Instapaper iPhone and iPad apps is the ability to use an RSS feed in addition to the Instapaper “Read Later” repositories. This means you could add your favorite web site as an Instapaper folder and read it whenever you are ready. It also means you can incorporate Google Reader’s Starred Items with Instapaper. This capability is not present on the web site, but will sync there once you add it on the iPhone!

Here’s what to do on the iPhone:

	In the Instapaper app, tap the upper-left “+” icon to add a folder.
	This will bring up the “Add Folder” screen. Tap “Go to a specific site”.
	Enter the RSS feed of your favorite site, or for Google Reader Starred Items enter your Reader Shared RSS feed. It will look something like the following: “http://google.com/reader/shared/sfoskett“
	Tap “Go” and Instapaper will add your Starred Items or other RSS feed as a folder both in the iPhone or iPad app and the web site.

Stephen’s Stance

Instapaper brings awesome new functionality to my web workflow, and adds real value to my professional and personal life. That’s not something you can say about most apps on the web or iPhone/iPad. It adds a calm, reflective element to the hyperactive online hypertext experience.

The service is free, as is the basic Instapaper Free iPhone app. But I recommend spending US $5 on the upgraded Instapaper Pro app for iPhone and iPad: It removes the ads and brings killer features including full-screen iPad support, a dark mode (seen above), tilt scrolling, and storage of 250 articles for offline reading. It’s well worth the money!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Instapaper for iPad and iPhone Enhances My Web World
This post was categorized as Apple, Features, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Google keeps rolling out the improvements

Google Reader has long been my RSS feed reader of choice, but using it was never much of a social experience. The earlier attempts at community, from shared feeds to comments, just fell flat. Good thing the solo experience (not to mention the iPhone version) was so solid or I would have given up a long time ago.

Today, Google announced improvements to Reader, making the experience somewhat more social.

• The ability to search for shared feeds is great! I’ve already located three solid shared feeds from folks I don’t know.
• The old string-of-digits shared URL is now (optionally) replaced by your google username (mine is http://www.google.com/reader/shared/sfoskett for example)
• It’s no FriendFeed, but the “Like” tag (keyboard shortcut “L”) ought to help discover other folks with good shared items to follow.

All in all, this might be Google’s most useful Reader upgrade. I’m pleased! But of course I can think of a raft of improvements!

• Why is it always so hard to use Google’s products? It’s a web (pardon the pun) of accounts, settings, and profiles. Who can figure out which products are linked and which aren’t?
• It would be cool to highlight, search, or categorize “liked” posts, allowing others to act as a filter and highlight better content. Or maybe I just haven’t figured this out yet!
• I still don’t get the value of comments…

Finally, I have one suggestion to help you get more visibility: ”Find people” searches for “name, location, occupation or interest”, and treats your list of interests as search keys. So it’s probably best to enter simple, short comma-separated keywords for interests in your Google Profile. And it’s definitely worthless to write a nice long sentence.

Find me in Google:

• My profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/sfoskett
• My shared items: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/sfoskett

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Reader Gets More Social
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Note: This post is about Google, because it is by far the dominant search engine, advertiser, and “portal” in the English-speaking world. Nearly everything mentioned here applies equally to other search engines and advertising providers.

Ranking Pages

Google’s relevance comes from their historical ability to present a quality searchable portal to the entire Internet. The majority of Google’s revenue is also derived from quality information, giving them the ability to present more-compelling advertising to web users.

Google’s core success is based on its ability to discover and rank the quality of Internet content. Gmail, Reader, Picasa, Apps, and the rest of the Google properties are surely excellent sources of information on the preferences of individual users, but they contribute only slightly to the other side of the coin: Information about Internet content. For that, they still rely on the core technology invented at Stanford a decade ago: PageRank.

Every time it encounters a link, Google’s software “spider” follows it, adding the content of the linked web page to an index. Google, like other early search engines, counts each link as a vote for the quality of the page. The genius of PageRank is that Google weights each vote based on the quality of the page it comes from. Although PageRank is not the entirety of Google, it is a singular key element.

Put simply, Google’s success depends on its ability to gather and rank the links we all make and match them to the data we provide about ourselves. Without this, Google will fail.

The Changing Web

The graphical Web is not the Internet. My first experiences online came well before graphical hypertext clients (what we now call browsers) dominated the user experience and became the web. Although the network we call the Internet now supports a very wide variety of traffic, Google’s preeminence comes only from the Web. They have little or no reach into the massive streams of corporate data, multimedia, and other non-hypertext content streaming across the ‘net.

When it was first developed, the web was manual and links were hand-selected and carefully put into context. It was difficult to put together a web page, and those pages that were developed were were static. The social networks of the time (USENET, IRC, and email mostly) were not integrated into the web, did not generally include links. So the first search engines, and later ones like Google, focused on this relatively small pool of pages and links.

But the web soon became automated, subsuming most other interactive services. Social (user-generated) interaction moved into the web in a big way, with blogs, wikis, and discussion forums enabling rapid content creation and reference by users. Sharing links in the social web, and through social bookmarking services, generally replaced the manual pages of old.

At first, this explosion of user-generated content was a dream scenario for Google. They could harvest the collective intelligence of us all to identify and rank content. But as the number of pages and links exploded, the notion of a “web page” was radically shifted from a stable and predictable set of data to a dynamic portal into a vast store of content. Where everyone once saw the same content at a given URL, now each of us has his own experience.

Spammers and scammers realized the value of Google placement and flooded this dynamic social web with links. This threatened not only to undermine the relevance that supports Google’s search (and advertising) business, but it also threatened these new social services themselves. Each honest, relevant link added to a Wikipedia article, included in a Slashdot comment, or shared on a service like Digg was dwarfed by the thousands or millions of spam links injected to boost the PageRank of “client” sites.

I Don’t Follow

Google and the social net fought valiantly against this wave of link spam, but it became clear that something more radical was needed. The only way to fight spam was to make it useless to the spammers. Thus was born a simple but highly-effective tool: Nofollow.

Webmasters long had the ability to tell the Google spider to ignore a certain set of hosted pages through the use of a server-side list called robots.txt. But spammers wanted the exact opposite. What was needed was a client-side way to specify that a link was not worthy of being spidered and ranked by the search engines. This would eliminate the primary benefit of link spam.

Implementing client-side spider blocking was trivial: A simple tag, “rel=nofollow”, was added alongside the url in a web link. This way, Google’s spider would simply ignore every “nofollow” link it encountered, and they would never be searched or ranked in the index.

But spammers would never put the nofollow tag in their own links. So sites quickly began implementing blanket nofollow policies: Every link submitted by users in any form would receive the tag by default. The idea would be that links that had not yet been vetted by users would get the nofollow tag and those that were deemed acceptable would not. But most sites never figured out the right process to allow the nofollow tag to be removed. Today, nearly every social service, from FaceBook to Twitter to Digg to StumbleUpon, permanently marks nearly every link this way. Even Wikipedia, a long-time holdout, finally switched to a default nofollow on all but the English site.

The Nofollow War

What does this mean for Google? If the vast majority of user-generated links are tossed into the spam category as far as the search engine is concerned, it means that their entire system of discovering and ranking links is in jeopardy. The major social services, most of which attract the majority of end-user traffic, content, and links, are rendered useless in generating relevancy.

But these are the exact sources that Google ought to be focusing on the most. Many have noted that they hear about news more rapidly through real-time sources like Twitter than through less-dynamic traditional news sites and blogs. Even if Google had the ability to spider a service like Twitter in real time, which is doubtful, they would gain no insight from the links included in these sources. Social bookmarking sites like Digg are chock full of user-vetted links and should be gold mines for Google, but the nofollow tag makes them invisible.

This scarcity of user-generated links has made the links that are followable even more valuable. Scammers constantly create fake blogs of scraped (read “stolen”) content and users are paid to include followable links anywhere they can. Sites with a high PageRank value are constantly inundated with offers and attacked by hackers to siphon off high-value “votes”.

High-profile content providers are circling their wagons, drastically cutting down on outside links in order to focus PageRank on their own properties. Smaller publishers and blogs are striking back at the big guys, decrying their dearth of external links. Some even go so far as to initiate blanket nofollow policies against these big, respected, but non-linking sites.

This leaves Google with even fewer useful links with which to examine the Web. It also leaves the biggest content providers and networks and the savviest search engine optimization (SEO) pros with a bigger slice of the valuable top-of-Google result real estate.

The Fix Is In

Google is left with a looming nightmare scenario: As smaller, alternative, social, and real-time content providers disappear from the search engine, its overall relevance and value declines. Soon, a tipping point will be reached when users would rather rely on Twitter, FaceBook, and the rest for their Internet interactions than the old-fashioned search engine, email, and RSS readers that Google currently dominates. This house-of-cards collapse can only be avoided by including user-generated content in the Google index.

Search engines could simply ignore the nofollow tag, wading into the social stream and combatting spam in other ways. But this would lead to another rapid upswing of link spam, shifting the burden to content providers once again. And it might also expose links that actually should not be followed, leading to technical and even legal trouble.

The best solution would see the social networks designing in some method of removing the nofollow attribute once links are verified to be relevant and correct. But there is no incentive for them to help drive Google traffic to other sites. Indeed, Twitter recently took the next step, arranging the titles of user pages in an attempt to SEO their way to the top page of Google searches for user’s names. Only altruistic systems like Wikipedia are likely to design in this type of response.

Another possible scenario (to be explored another day) is the usurpation of today’s social web and its content by a new next-generation service. A web-based social client like FriendFeed could rapidly siphon away both existing and net-new content and users in the guise of openness and interoperability. Although new web spiders like Cuil have failed, perhaps old-fashioned crawling capability is no longer all that valuable in the social web.

The most likely fix is both predictable and pragmatic: Google must buy all successful source of social links (like Twitter, Bit.ly, StumbleUpon, and even FaceBook) and integrate them into their search system. Owning Twitter would enable Google to decide which links to follow and which to ignore. The reward of improving search results would be the incentive needed to add “re-follow” capability. Buying these services would also give Google an open pipe of the real-time traffic flowing through these services, a critical resource that they currently lack.

Google simply can not afford not owning the real-time web, and they must continue to buy up similar sources of content as they appear. Yahoo was unable to extract value from StumbleUpon, but Google’s other competitors will certainly try to undermine the search giant. Frankly, I’m shocked that Microsoft, FaceBook, or even Baidu have not yet snapped up services like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Digg even if only to keep them and the information they contain out of Google’s hands.

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Is Heading For A Cliff; What Will They Do?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Disqus and Intense Debate proposed to close this comment hole by replacing the comment capability of participating blogs with a centralized system. Automattic, maker of the popular WordPress blog software, even recently acquired Intense Debate. But these systems merely add another destination to check for comments and replies.

I wished for some ability to follow comments automatically, right within Google Reader, and now I (nearly) have it! BackType is a clever service that tracks blog comments, associating them with their authors through the URLs many people use when posting. Users of this service can then “claim” their comments (via these URLs) and associate them with their account.

But that’s not the part that hooked me. Once you have an account, you can look up your favorite comment authors and “follow” them through BackType, subscribing to an RSS feed to follow the comments they leave in the future. This even works for people who don’t have a BackType account – anyone using a common URL can be followed in this way. And BackType integrates with nifty network-of-networks lifestream aggregator, FriendFeed.

BackType isn’t perfect, but it’s constantly being improved. It only checks certain blogs. You can submit them through a bookmarklet, but it would be nice if it had a wider set already. I’d also love to be able to automatically “follow” any comments left for a blog post after I comment. In other words, add all comments, no matter who writes them, to my feed for that one post.

But BackType is good enough already that I heartily recommend it. Follow me!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | BackType Is Closing The Blog Comment Hole
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Feed readers are great. I can sit down in the morning, open Google Reader on my iPhone or PC, and catch up on my favorite news sources on my favorite topics, from Apple to enterprise storage, to the Red Sox. It’s like my own personalized New York Times.

But I want more socialization! I’ve been loving Friendfeed since I can see what (a few of) my friends like and dislike, and even their comments. And I love Friendfeed’s friend-of-a-friend feed, since it lets me find other new friends to disagree with! It’s like reading the New York Times with my buddies at a nice local coffee shop!

But I want more interaction! See, by reading blogs in Google Reader, I miss out on the comments, and I am far less likely to comment myself. And we need to be able to watch blog-to-blog threads.

So here’s what I want: A reader like Google Reader with social features like Friendfeed and integrated comment reading and writing.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Implement blog post threading per Ryan Tate’s excellent in-reply-to suggestion.
2. Import post comments and display them on demand within the feed reader.
3. Use OpenID (where supported) and cached logins (everywhere else) to let me add comments to the original blog within the feed reader.
4. Add multiple feed sources (like FriendFeed) and de-duplicate links and posts so I see a nice, clean, integrated stream from everyone.

Now, Louis Gray tells me that AssetBar is heading in this direction. And I’ve tried it – although it’s getting better, it’s still not what I want. Like every other thing I’ve seen, it lacks threading and integrated blog commenting.
Note that the integrated commenting I’ve postulated are very different from the comments appearing on FriendFeed and AssetBar! Comments on these sites exist only in the “walled garden” of that particular application. I’m talking about a more correct implementation that puts the comments in the source blogs themselves, capitalizing on the fact that most blogs use a few specific platforms (WordPress, TypePad, Blogger) with integrated logins, and many support OpenID commenting.

That’s what I want. Who will give it to me?

Update:  Frederic at The Last Podcast proposed the same commenting idea a month ago!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | I Want a Real Blog Aggregator
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.