While I suspect this initiative will be as carefully crafted by the respective Presidential campaigns as their TV commercials and speeches, give credit to Google for putting together a cool initiative for users of Google Reader that might bring more users into the fold along the way. The popular RSS reader has just launched “Google Power Readers in Politics,” a collection of Shared Items from the McCain and Obama campaigns, along with those of high powered political journalists like Arianna Huffington and Patrick Ruffini.

On Power Readers in Politics, you can browse what each of the candidates and journalists is sharing, and like any Google Reader shared items feed, subscribe to it via RSS. Each user’s shared items page also includes a list of their favorite sites to read. The homepage is a mashup of the most recently shared content from all of the participants.

Read more: mashable.com 

Labels: McCain, Obama, political, reader

Back in December, Google Reader announced that it was introducing a feature that let users share posts with anyone in their Gmail/Gtalk contact list. Unfortunately, the sharing was all-or-nothing - if you decided to share a post, it would be available to all of your contacts, as there was no way to single out a group to share a post with. This lack of control led to a privacy debate as a number of high profile bloggers wrote that Google Reader needed to include granular privacy controls. Google responded with a workaround option using tags, but it was inconvenient and unintuitive.

Today, Google Reader has finally implemented custom friends lists, which allows users to selectively share posts. However, while this will restrict who your posts are automatically shared with, the added privacy may not be enough for some people, as users will still be able to access your shared posts through a static public URL.

Read more: techcrunch.com 

Labels: reader, share

ReadAir 0.1 is an OSX Themed Desktop Client for Mac or Windows. Built with Adobe Air.

Features
 · Mac themed scrollbars and form elements
 · Full synchronization with Google Reader Account
 · Add/Remove/Manage tags
 · Subscribe/Unsubscribe from feeds
 · Search your feeds
 · User preferences
 · Resizable viewing pane
 · Auto software update
 · Auto login

Download: ReadAir 0.11 

Labels: Adobe, airlines, Macintosh, ReadAir, reader

“Reader and Talk are Friends!”

That’s how Google announced earlier this month on one of its corporate blogs the expansion of the sharing features in Google Reader, the company’s service for viewing blogs. The feature didn’t win Google a lot of friends.

Several bloggers and users have sounded the alarm about this, with some justification.

Here’s what the brouhaha is about. For some time now, Google has allowed you to share with your friends blog posts you view using Reader. You got to select the items you wanted shared and you got to choose your friends. When you marked a new item as shared, your friends who use Reader would see it. (Technically, your shared items were on a public Web page, so they could have been seen by others who are not your friends, if those people could figure out how to find that page.)

Full story: nytimes.com 

Labels: reader, Talk

The Google Reader Blog announced several new features for Google Reader. The big feature is search. You can now search your subscriptions, including subscriptions to shared items.

Google Reader also enhanced the unread count numbers to show up to 1,000, as opposed to up to 100 unread subscriptions. Plus, you can now hide the left hand pane and use your back and forward browser buttons.

Read more: searchengineland.com 

Labels: feature, reader, search, subscriptions

This firefox extension shows you how many unread items you have in your Google Reader account.

Firefox versions: 1.5 - 2.0.0.

Download: Google Reader Notifier Firefox Extension 

Labels: browser, extensions, Firefox, reader