ReadWriteWeb

Google Reader may be one of the best things to happen to RSS/Atom feeds, but Feedly is definitely one of the best things to happen to Google Reader, and Feedly 8 makes it even better. With this release, Feedly adds tagging, "infinite" scrolling, and two new views.

The biggie, at least from my viewpoint, is the tagging. Feedly has always supported saving articles for later, but you just end up with a huge pile of items. Finding that really interesting piece on running a startup from last July can be tricky with no way to organize items except chronologically.

Last week, the Google Reader team caused quite a stir among many users when it launched a redesigned version of the popular RSS feed reading service. The relaunch not only gave Google Reader a new design, but removed the service's content-sharing and social features in an attempt to streamline the product and drive more people toward Google+. While the company did add a "Share" button of its own to Reader today, it still pushes posts to Google+ and doesn't quite restore the way the product used to work.

One of those disappointed users was Web developer Emmanuel Pire. Not content to see the beloved sharing feature go away, Pire built a replica of it on his own server and wrote a script that adds a "Share" button to the new Google Reader interface. This workaround doesn't restore the functionality 100%, but it comes pretty close.

Many big stories this week, but the biggest for our readers surrounded the Google Reader changes, and the lack of alternatives therein. There was also much discussion around the Internet of Things and Google's indexing of Facebook comments.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Internet of Things - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Yesterday, I got an email from a good friend with a subject line that needed no further explanation: "Google Reader." It was sent to a group of mutual friends, bemoaning the recent changes to Reader's interface, thereby kicking off a lengthy discussion thread. Should we move to Google Plus? Would Instapaper make a good substitute? Had anybody heard of Hivemined? What about other RSS readers?

The concerns echoed sentiments that were by then flooding Twitter and other nooks and crannies of the Web. In the process of redesigning Reader, the team decided to kill off the social features long beloved by many power users of the service. Suddenly, friending, sharing and commenting were all gone, as was the outbound RSS feed of shared items each user generated.

Today Google Reader became the latest Google product to have Plus added to it. Now Google Reader users can +1 or share items to Google Plus, from within Reader. Google has made very clear over the past month that Plus will be integrated into all of Google's products over time, so this wasn't a surprising move. However, rather predictably, there has been a user backlash anyway. Writing on his G+ profile, Google Plus Marketing Manager and long-time RSS expert Louis Gray tried to assure everyone that they have choices: "We know that for some people, the changes to Reader will make you think differently about the product, and this may make you seek alternatives."

But are there in fact any viable alternatives to Google Reader?

After announcing on October 20 that Google Reader would be annexed by Google Plus, Reader has gotten the ol' +1 today. Google is rolling out the new, clean Plus theme that has already come to Gmail, Docs and elsewhere, and it is replacing the Reader "Like" function with the +1 button. Sharing from Google Reader now produces a +snippet. I guess we no longer need that nice workaround.

But it's not all plusses on Google Reader today. Reader's social features, beloved by some avid readers who didn't want the noise of sharing on full-fledged social networks, are now switched off. No more friending, following and sharing; it's all circling and +1s now.

Why did Google Plus gain more users in a few weeks than Google Reader has in years? That's a question for the ages - but it's clear that Google's strategy of infusing Google Plus functionality into all things will sometimes come at a cost. Google announced today that Reader will soon undergo a revamp and lose its stand-alone social networking-type features in favor of integration into Google Plus. The company knows that not everyone will be happy about that. Hope you like Google Plus's various policies, users of Reader, Docs, YouTube, etc. because that's soon going to be the only game in Googletown.

If you're a Google Reader user who likes sharing links with other Google Reader users, you're going to have to get used to +1ing everything instead. Most people aren't Google Reader users, though. Most people have not experienced the life-changing, world-affirming joy that is a good RSS reading experience. Google Plus has already caught on far, far more than Google Reader. It's sad, but it's true.

Those of us who are still playing with Google Plus are eagerly awaiting its further integration into other Google services (in ways other than the red box in the top right corner). The updates are coming slowly but surely; Google Docs is now integrated with Hangouts, Google Maps can be shared as posts, and Plus posts are starting to appear in Google Web search.

But Google Plus is built around sharing, and one of Google's best sharing services is missing: Google Reader. It's the free RSS reader that lets anyone subscribe to any website's feed, and it's behind some of the most popular RSS client apps, like Feedly. But there's no built in way to share articles from Google Reader with your circles on Plus. Fortunately, you can make one pretty easily. Here's how.

RSS feeds were a big driver of innovation in the Web 2.0 era. RSS Readers like Bloglines, Newsgator and Google Reader became the go-to services for people to subscribe to the latest news and blog posts. Over the past couple of years, mobile phones have become a major content consumption device. Yet RSS Readers have struggled to make the transition. In part this has been due to the increased importance of Twitter and Facebook for circulating news and information. But it's also because tracking RSS feeds on your smartphone is a user interface challenge - and few, if any, startups have solved it.

This is the third post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. The first post explored the thriving world of music on smartphones and yesterday we looked at news apps on the iPad. Today we analyze RSS on smartphones.

Last week we reported on the demotion of the link to Google Reader below the "more" fold inside Gmail, asking whether it was part of a general trend away from enthusiasm about RSS. That made me very sad, because it decreased the likelihood of casual discovery of this fabulous technology. Now it turns out that Google says (via Twitter, not on its blog or feed!) that the move was a mistake and will be returned soon, possibly as early as today.

Alexia Tsotsis wrote last night that the company determines the placement of services in the toolbar by popularity, and the Picasa photo sharing service was correctly added, but according to a Google representative it should have been in addition to and not instead of Reader. In celebration of the good news, perhaps we should all send the following video, Common Craft's intro to RSS, to a friend in need of a life changing web technology. It's easy to be snarky about peoples' supposed over-reaction to the demotion of a link, it's another matter to recognize a valuable tool and share it with others.