Google Reader “Trends” and “Offline” – Making a perfect product better

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Osama A.

Osama runs a Social Media Marketing Agency and a Software Product Company. He has been involved in building online communities since 1997 and his major strengths are understanding how people choose to come together and work as strong cohesive units that believe in brands or causes. His team's flagship product offers highly innovative ways to get professional teams to work better together - resulting in significantly saved time in common tasks around getting people on the same page; and also resulting in a greater sense of trust among virtual teammates. You may contact him at hashmi@cdfsoftware.com with inquiries.

Google reader has been regarded by many many people as the hands-down best RSS reader and aggregator around, and I agree.

Since I’ve started Green & White, I’ve used a number of ways of managing news sources, including Firefox toolbar, email alerts, RSS readers, and finally Google Reader.

What switched me over from my desktop RSS Reader to Google was a number of things, but particularly very well thought-out user interface and being able to create a dynamic “link blog” containing the best articles you find.

That is how I sort through the 250 odd journals I track every day (which come from aggregated sources and 104 RSS subscriptions) to give you the best articles from around the web (on the right-side bar).

Now, Google just added two more features to make the offering even better.

Google Reader Trends
Trends is a nice thought — it helps you understand what you’ve been reading a lot of and what’s been updating very frequently but perhaps not on your watch list, and more. Look at the screenshot to get a better idea.

So now you know delivering those “recommended articles” section on Green & White is quite a scientific process!

Google Reader Offline
Here is another interesting feature the company revealed on a recent development day — you click a button and Google downloads the past 2000 articles to your PC so you can read through them casually as you fly on your next business trip.

It goes to show… good product design starts and ends and thinking about what would make the lives of users better / easier / more comfortable / more inspiring.

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