Thoughts on possible changes to Google Reader
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Quick thought: when reading an aggregated feed within Google Reader, you get so accustomed to reading a stream of blog posts from, say, Boing Boing that it can be fairly confusing to start reading a post from read/write web
An idea for google might be to add an image fetched from the feed's site and add it to the top of the post. An icon like that might help identify subconsciously what you're reading.
It’s quite easy for items from low-traffic sites to get lost amongst the higher-traffic ones, isn’t it? Quite often, they’re the more significant news/posts, too.
I think adding thumbnails could slow the whole thing down quite a bit, though. When I get posts with images in, they can cause Google Reader to ‘drag’ quite a bit.
How about using colour to identify sites, like contributors in Gmail threads? Consistent user experience ‘n’ all that! :)
I considered colour coding, but how many feeds do I subscribe to? (Answer: lots). You’d soon run out. I think that a tiny icon isn’t really going to put that much drag on it - if it’s ~1kb, then you’ve not really got a great problem.
Thanks for popping by, though!