Guest: Nick Baum - Google

Hi, my name is Nick Baum and I'm the product manager for Google Reader. We're here at Google, in one of the conference rooms and I want to give you a little demo of our newest release here. So, we like to think of Google Reader as an inbox for the web. So, what it does is that it keeps track of all your favorite sites and it puts them into one convenient location, so that you don't have to go checking them all the time, -- see has anything updated on this one when did I last check this one, now they're all in one place. For example, say I like the BBC and on the BBC page and I see this little RSS icon here that means that I can subscribe to the site and a number of feed readers including Google Reader. I click that, I get a page of their feed here; feed is just a way of describing the content and I can select the address and copy that and then go into Google Reader, I click 'Add Subscription Here' and I will go to paste it and right away the feed gets added.

First thing you'll notice about the interface of Google Reader here is that, it looks very similar to Gmail and that's intentional. The idea is that Gmail is a very convenient way to keep track of email and Google Reader should be a very convenient way to keep track of your websites. You've got a list of items, some items are white these are the unread items that I haven't seen yet and then some of the items are blue and these are the older items that I've already read. So, if I click on an item, it expands right away here in the interface I can also see a small description of it, there are keyboard shortcuts so if I press 'J', I can move down. So all in all, this view makes it very easy to skim, figure out exactly what it is I want to read, if something catches my attention, I can just open it up right away. Now, some feeds have also the full content of the post in them and so if I go to the Google blog here, for example, I might want to use this other view called the 'expanded view' and here the full text actually loads up.

So, I can just go through here and I scroll down, as you see that currently selected item here has a little blue border and that means that this item is getting marked as red. If I want to keep it new, I can always uncheck the 'Check' box here. But, this means that I don't really have to worry about what have I seen, what haven't I seen, anything that I scroll down to will automatically be marked as red in this interface. Another nice little touch in both of these views is that, as I scroll down, more items get loaded, so we start by loading 20 items but you never have to click 'Next Page' or anything like that, the other items just keeping showing up at the bottom. There are number of actions that you can take in every item, the first one is the 'Star' that you'll recognize from Gmail. Stars have many different uses, some people use them to keep track of things they want to follow-up on, some people use them to save some of their favorite posts and we really leave that up to the user. The way it works, very simple, I click on the 'Star', goes golden and then I can go to my star'd items and the item shows up in the list here.

Let's go back to the Google blog feed, like so we get the second action this is actually my favorite new feature in this UI, is the 'Shared Link'. So, I click on the Shared Link and it goes orange and so you might wonder what does this do, well first of all I visit my shared items. More interestingly, it actually puts it on a shared items webpage. So this is just like any other webpage accessible by any one on the web, you can send a link to your friend, they can bookmark it and they can go visit it and all the items that you've shared, show off on it. It's very easy to do this; you can go to the reader blog here, I can share an item there and it'll appear on the -- as I reload this page, it'll appear at the top of my shared items. You know same thing if I want to take something off the page, I can just go to my shared items and I can click on that 'Unshare' link and it will disappear. So, what this does is it makes it really simple for you to take an item or an article that you found really interesting, put it somewhere on the web where your friends and your family can go check it out.

Let's talk a little more about how you can add subscriptions, to your feed reader. So, say I want a tad of Robert Scoble's blog. One thing I can do here is I can just do a search; I can type 'Scoble' and what we'll see if we get any results here for your new feed and lo and behold! First item is the Scobleizer Word Press blog, I can click 'Subscribe' and right away it shows up, it's here at the bottom. I can start reading it, it's that easy. Now, say I don't know exactly what I want to subscribe to, then I might go to browse instead, one other thing we've added into this version is the ability to add large groups of feeds in one go. So, we have a number of different categories and you can move your mouse over to see what's included in it. Say I'm interested in good meals and restaurants I might want to subscribe to the food bundle and the food bundle is just going to add a number of feeds related to food.

This makes it really easy for you to keep track of a general topic that you're interested in and you don't have to know exactly, what are the reference sites to keep track of it, so it's a great way to get started. As you can see here, feeds have shown up and they're all in a little folder, which is pretty convenient. The last thing I want to talk about is that this is not the only way you can access your reader because we're built on a very flexible Google technology. We can actually have it show up in other places, so one example is if you have a Google personalized home page, you can use one of these little personalized homepage modules. And so, I have my weather and I have my little quotes and stuff like that and I can scroll through my unread items here on Google Reader and I can even read them right there in my personalized homepage. So, that's pretty convenient, the other thing that we have is a -- we have a mobile interface. So, if you have a cell phone that has an internet connection, you can go to 'Settings' and 'Goodies' here, you'll find first of all the personalized homepage link, you'll find the mobile interface, I'll show it here in the browser but you can imagine how it would look on a smaller screen.

You got a link same thing, you can just read them right there in your cell phone. There are some other fun things in the Settings and the Goodies here, tone I particularly like is this little bookmark called the 'Next Bookmark' so I can choose one of my folders or tags and then I take this link and I drag it up to my Bookmark's bar and now when I click on it, it will just take me to the next unread item in that category. So, I click 'Next' and now it shows my photography items and so it'll just take me directly to the next picture from my unread items. That's actually a really fun way for me to browse around the web because from the picture blogs, I like seeing the look of the site itself and this allows me to very easily jump from post to post. But yeah, that is in a few short words, what the new reader interface looks like, we hope you'll try it out, we've made it as easy and fun to use as possible and we think the sharing features are really compelling, so give it a go, you can find it at reader.google.com and let us know what you think.