I can no longer “share” items from my feed-reader nor add notes to my “shared” items, which means the way that I’ve been generating the Femmostroppo Reader posts for the last few years will no longer work.
We're sorry, Google Reader no longer supports the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet
I’m sure that there will be a work-around, but for now I am not a happy bunny. If you know of a nice shiny way to replicate the share with note function of the old Google Reader, please let me know.
Categories: technology
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Boo, boo, so much boo. There’s less reading space and I don’t like how it’s integrated with G+ and and and I just don’t like it.
I don’t actually mind it but I only use a fraction of what it actually does.
In the medium term, perhaps this?
Some of the “Sharebros” are creating a new RSS reader which basically replicates the old Google reader with a few more easy-share with FB and Twitter options – hivemined.org
Looking forward to giving it a test run when they get it going, but will still need someone to create a plugin that pulls the recent shared items for a post.
Link to article about above: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/10/sharebros-are-building-google-reader-replacement/44307/
Nope, don’t like the way it looks at all!
Liam, I didn’t see your comment before I posted mine! Yes, I’m hoping that Hivemined will eventually do what I want, but it looks like it might take a few weeks.
@Tamara, if I could still share items and use note-in-reader I’m sure that I could get used to the new look fairly quickly. It’s the functionality that I miss.
@blue_bec has also shared her thoughts on G+
+1 to the annoyance that sharing items has gone. With no warning!
And also, like Chally, the integration with google+ (which I will not use until and unless they change their nyms policy, and maybe not even then) is … provoking, to say the least. I guess that the loss of the sharing functionality is because there is something like that in google+?
Ah, I’ve now read bluebec’s post (thanks for the link, Mindy). Yes, what she said.
Yeah, I don’t like it either and I hate google+. By taking away the like/share functions and putting in the 1+ thing, they’re basically forcing me to use google+. I don’t think so. I moved every blog I follow to another reader and I refuse to use google reader now. The people who were following me are just out of luck, and they would have been out of luck had I moved to google+ since they were following vesta44, not my real name. Seeing as how google+ won’t let me sign up under vesta44, which I’ve been using online ever since I got online 14 years ago, google can kiss my big fat azz (and they had better bring their lunch, it’s an all-day job).
@tigtog – I know, I was just being superficial.
G+ is just too much like facebook. If I wanted to use facebook, I would use facebook.
Also, I don’t want to have to go to actual sites to read a decent amount of the article. I want my old rss feed back where you could read a decent amount ( or all of the article, depending on what the sharer friend has chosen), and then decide if you want to go to the site ( e.g. to read comments).
I know a lot of people are decamping to newsblur in my neck of the woods–haven’t tried it myself, though, so I don’t know what the sharing functionality is like.
I believe G+ has reversed its position on pseudonyms and will be allowing them again soon. Can’t remember where I read that though.
TAK: their current position is that they will allow support for pseudonyms “soon”, but no timeline has been released and crucially no answers to what are for many people rather critical questions:
(1) will having more than one account active on G+ (and associated products as Reader and Picasa are now) be a violation?
(2) will Google require that you tell them your real name in private, which is not acceptable to some users?
See for example jwz’s analysis.
-1 for Google. WTF. I used Greader basically as my online clipping service to save and tag stuff by topic for (possible) future reference. Bad, Google.
I also hate the Google+ stuff. I had Reader down pat and am bitter that they’re making me change. Why couldn’t they leave well enough alone?
And now I’ve got a popup asking me to switch to the new look gmail – nuh uh.
I can get used to not having “note in reader,” though that was a pretty sweet feature, but the whole thing really messed up on my end. I thought it was just my ancient browser, but when I switched to a newer one, some of the functionality was still broken. It doesn’t scroll properly and searching individual feeds is more difficult. Boo Google.
I had that scrolling problem too. I seem to have fixed it through a proactive campaign of forgetting about it and doing other things though. I really miss the like button, because sometimes I want to show approval for something without sharing it with other people.
I quite like the new gmail. As far as I can tell they’ve just changed the look of the icons. I can do without the “importance” tags though. And the clock seems to be behind, because at 10am it was still showing the night-time theme.
Google is determined to keep me away from more and more of their products. Nice work, Google!
I’m not making any judgement about whether the feature was useful, but from a software developer’s point of view its rarely an option to “just leave it alone”. They probably sliced quite a bit of code out by merging the share functionality with G+. And that’s code in the future they won’t have to maintain.
One of Google Reader’s former product managers* has a critical review of it
* Term for the person who is responsible for keeping the product (or some part of it, for a large one) on track in a vision sense: it should do this, it should serve these purposes for us and our users.
A workaround for sharing items in Reader via a third party bookmarking service (can use either delicious or pinboard)
http://thomaspark.me/2011/11/share-in-google-reader-again/
These two comments on Brian Shih’s post sum it up for me:
I’ve never used Share, so I can’t help with that. I’m mainly put out by the excessive amount of white space so I can’t see so much of the actual content. Some things from comments on Brian Shih’s post that I’ll find useful if I can remember them: keyboard shortcuts F (fullscreen toggle) and U (toggle the sidebar. Why U?).
I only moved to Google Reader a couple of years ago when Bloglines disappeared, and I was annoyed that it tied it to my Gmail. No way I’m going to join G+ … anyone know anohter good feedreader?
Commenting again because I forgot to subscribe to comments (also, out darn typo which I noticed after posting)
I’m with you, Susan, if there was a proper (non-browser) RSS client that could sync across machines, that would be the solution for me.
Susan @ 27 – The current Google UI designers do seem to have an unhealthy love with space at the moment. All their products are getting infected by it.
@chris, interesting the increased space for so-called readability seems to have come at the cost of some of the previously-OK accessibility features.
Apparently an update was rolled out for Reader this afternoon, and now in the Settings (click on gear button in the top toolbar) I see a Send To feature, which allows a choice to send items in reader to various other sharing services with a single click. They offer quite a few services out of the box, and you can add custom links to those which aren’t there already.
It’s a start.