Many Ghacks readers use Google Reader as their main RSS feed reader. It offers an impressive list of features and options and is generally considered to be one of the best RSS feed readers available. One prime advantage over desktop clients is that the update process does not use resources of the local computer system. The Firefox add-on gReactions adds another interesting feature to Google Reader which should be interesting for a lot of Google Reader users who browse the web with the Firefox web browser.
The Firefox extension adds a new link to the article view toolbar. The new entry is called Show Comments and available on the right end of the toolbar. A click on the link will automatically fetch all comments from the website and Twitter and display the entries below the actual news article.
This is an interesting option for users who do not want to open articles in a new tab. Comments are usually the only element that are not displayed for full feeds. It might be less useful if a partial feed is provided by the website in question.
The Firefox add-on gReactions is available for all Firefox releases except the 3.5x release branch. It is however possible to force compatible with an add-on like the Nightly Tester Tools.
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5 Responses to “gReactions Adds Comments To Google Reader”
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[...] gReactions Adds Comments To Google Reader (tags: webservice google reader firefox extension) [...]
Can’t see comments on ghacks…….depressed……
The plugin does not fetch the comments from the website itself but from different one called ubervu.com. The sites have to be registered at this site otherwise the plugin does not work. Deinstalled it immediately.
Now that is a serious blow. Funny that all the sites I tried did work though.
@Latz
Hey, I’m one of the cofounders of uberVU. The uberVU API is behind the gReactions plugin.
We crawl hundreds of thousands of posts daily, but you’re right, the post needs to be crawled by us already in order to display results. If the feed you’re reading is popular enough or has been added to our index, you’ll see results, otherwise it won’t work.
We do have an option to crawl URLs on demand, but that takes a few minutes if it’s done on the spot and that’s why it has not been released in this first version of the product.
If you think the product is useful, we’ll consider introducing that option for you guys. In the mean time, although it sucks, that was the best we could do for this first version.
Let me know your feedback and what other features you’d like from gReactions.