The new design has also been criticized for putting the content second to the interface. Lets take a look at the current implementation of Google Reader on the official site.

Users are greeted with the black Google toolbar at the top and a large area with logos and elements below. The actual news items are placed in large font with lots of whitespace in between, far from ideal for users who want to get quick overviews of new items posted.

The userscript (also available as a Firefox add-on) Google Reader New Style Minimalistic turns Google Reader changes the interface to a minimalistic one that is optimized for using as much screen estate as possible for Google Reader posts. Lets take a look at how Google Reader looks with the userscript installed and activated.

The new interface removes almost all the static elements at the top. The font size has been reduced to display more news items and categories on the screen at the same time. When you click on a news post you will notice that the same font size design is used which means that less scrolling is required (if at all) to read a full post on the Google Reader website.

The userscript is compatible with Firefox, and maybe other browsers as well. Firefox users can alternatively install the Firefox add-on instead

Radbox offers a different solution for this, and several other related, situations. The online service basically collects, or saves, information about videos that you want to watch at a later time, with options to do watch those saved videos at any time at their website, or a compatible RSS reader.

That’s helpful for users who get video links regularly that they cannot watch immediately, but also for users who like to visit multiple video portals to find new interesting videos (the type that collects first and watches later).

The main way of saving online videos to your Radbox account is with the help of a bookmarklet. Just click on the bookmarklet whenever you are on a page with videos. But the bookmarklet is not the only way of adding videos to the account.

Users can add videos by email. The Extras page of their account lists a secret email address that they can use to save videos to their account. They can for instance forward an email with a video link to their Radbox email address. Video links of supported services are automatically parsed and the videos added to the video list of the account.

Another option is the integration of Radbox in Google Reader. The configuration adds a link to Radbox to Google Reader which, when clicked, saves the videos on the page to the Radbox account. The service supports way over one hundred video services, from Youtube over Gametrailers and Justin.tv to The Guardian, Bravo TV and Fox Sports.

Lets talk about accounts for a second. New users can create a Radbox account by entering an email address and password. No verification or additional details are required.

All videos that have been saved to the account are listed on the main account page first, from where they can be moved to the favorites or archives later on.

A click on a video opens the embedded video on a new page. Video controls are taken from the hosting video portal, and additional options added by Radbox. It is for instance possible to visit the video source, share it with friends at Twitter, Facebook or per email, display the video description or add it to the favorites, trash or archives.

The other videos that are currently saved on the user’s frontpage are displayed below the playing video. A click on any of them loads them directly on the same page.

Radbox offers a rich media RSS feed for videos that can be added to compatible RSS readers such as Google Reader or Boxee so that it is theoretically not necessary to visit the Radbox page again after the account has been setup and the RSS feed url copied.

Especially the extra features, like RSS integration, make Radbox more than just an online tool to save and watch videos from multiple video sources. Is it enough to use the service regularly? That depends largely on the amount of videos and video links a user receives and discovers throughout the day. If the count is high enough it may be worth it.

The solution? Gtweet, a service that acts as a proxy between Twitter RSS Feeds and feed readers such as Google Reader. Best of all, Gtweet connects directly to Twitter for the authentication so that the server will never see nor store the Twitter username or password.

All it takes to see the list of personal Twitter feeds is to click the sign in with Twitter button at the start page of the service. An authentication prompt is displayed on first run only, to allow Gtweet access to the information on Twitter.

Gtweet displays a list of available feeds on the next page. Available for free users are the timeline feed that is made up of the logged in user’s messages and messages from friends.

Three premium user feed types are available as well, which are currently beta tested. Users can request a beta invite for temporary free access to the following additional feeds:

• Mentions, which lists all mentions of the user on Twitter in an RSS feed.
• Lists, which is a feed of the user’s Twitter lists
• Searches, which displays the saved Twitter searches in feed form.

Preferences are available to change some formatting options in the feed. Here it is again important to distinguish between free and premium options. Free users can change the title formatting for individual messages and hide personal and / or retweets in the feed.

Premium users on top of that can configure the feeds to display linked images directly in the tweet body and to expand short urls to their actual web addresses.

Gtweet is fully compatible with all RSS readers including Google Reader. It can be used to access a personal Twitter RSS feed directly in those RSS reader. (thanks Roman for the tip)

Tools were developed in recent years to turn partial RSS feeds into full-text feeds. One of the easier to use tools is offered by Five Filters on their website.

A form at the top can be used to submit a new website or feed url to the service. The options available are only there for premium users who have a subscription. Everyone else can simply press the Create Feed button to see a preview of how the full-text feed looks like.

Please note that the free version includes ads at the bottom of the feed. The url on the preview page is the full feed url. Take a look at the preview to decide whether the service has converted the partial feed to a full feed. If it did you can then subscribe to the url of the page in your RSS feed reader.

A bookmarklet is available as well which can be used to convert partial feed items to full feed items on the fly.

To easily transform partial-feeds you encounter (or convert any content on a page into a 1-item feed), drag the link below to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Then whenever you’d like a full-text feed, click the bookmarklet.

The developers have made available their script on their site, so that webmasters can host it on their own servers. This gets rid of the ads at the bottom and the RSS items per feed limitation.

Other tools that promise to convert partial RSS feeds into Full-Text feeds:

• Wizard RSS, simple interface, had problems with some feeds.
• Unsum, this one is an advanced converter. It offers to detect full feeds automatically, but can be configured as well by adding start and end HTML tags that enclose the articles on the site. No limit on feed items delivered, great service.
• Google Reader Preview Enhanced, a userscript that works only when Google Reader is the feed reader used. Developer has stopped development though, look at the comments to make it work with the latest Google Reader version.
• Feedex, suggested in the comments, turns partial feeds into full feeds automatically.

Tech savvy users have additional options, like creating their own construct using Yahoo Pipes. If I had to pick one of the services I’d pick Unsum, because of its customizability.

One Number is an interesting extension for the Google Chrome browser that acts as a notifier for the four Google services Gmail, Google Reader, Google Wave and Google Voice. It places a single icon in the web browser’s toolbar that displays the number of unread messages as one number.

The main benefit of this approach is that it saves up space in the Chrome toolbar if several Google services are used regularly (the extreme would be a reduction to one icon from four).

All four Google services are monitored by default. The options can be used to disable checks for specific services.

The first step after installation is to log into a Google account by left-clicking the icon in the toolbar and selecting the Log In link there.

The login redirects to the Google account login on the Google website.

The same menu contains a link to the options which can be used to disable and customize specific services (changing the color code or excluding their unread count from appearing in the number that is displayed in the toolbar) as well as server query intervals, timeouts and misc toolbar colors to indicate if multiple services have unread messages.

One Number is a Google service monitor that can be helpful for Googleholics who use at least two of the services that are currently supported by the Chrome extension (it’s also good for monitoring only one service but that would defeat much of its purpose).

The extension is compatible with Google Chrome 4 and can be downloaded from the official Google Chrome extensions website.

The chance is however relatively good that some developers have already created extensions for popular web services. This article will look at five Google Chrome extensions for popular Google web services including Gmail and Google Reader.

Gmail Checker

Gmail Checker is a simple extension that displays a button in the Google Chrome menu bar. This button displays the number of unread email messages in the Gmail account which makes the extension useful as the user will be notified about new Gmail messages without having to visit the Gmail website first. [link]

Google Reader Checker

This is from the same developer who developed the Gmail Checker extension for the Chrome web browser. It is therefor not surprising that it works exactly like that extension. It will display a new button in the Chrome menubar that shows the count of the unread news items in Google Reader. [link]

Google Tasks

The Google Tasks add-on integrates Google Tasks into the web browser by allowing the user to access the tasks directly from within the web browser without having to open the Google Tasks website. [link]

gPDF

This extension allows the user to open pdf documents directly in Google Docs. There are two advantages of this method. First, no pdf reader needs to be installed on the computer system to read pdf documents and second, it will reduce the chance that the document exploits security vulnerabilities in the installed desktop pdf reader. [link]

Google Wave Checker

A basic extension that will display the unread Google Wave messages in the Google Chrome statusbar. [link]

Verdict:

Extensions are finally beginning to appear in greater numbers for the Google Chrome web browser but are hardly a match for the incredible amount of extensions for the Firefox web browser. It is likely that this is not going to change in the near future. The first step to make extensions more popular to both developers and end users would be to add extension capabilities to the public version of the Google browser.

Other additions and new features of FeedDemon 3 include a redesigned user interface, enhanced Twitter feed reading and replying, automatic hyperlinking, article sharing, performance improvements and tagging. The changelog lists dozens, if not hundreds of additional changes and additions to the RSS feed reader.

The interface of FeedDemon is divided into several levels. You got the header area with tools and options, the left sidebar with subscriptions, tags, watches and clippings, the main area that displays popular items on the start page, feed titles, excerpts or full articles once a feed or category has been selected.

Feed Demon can import feeds from various sources. It can import from an opml file or from external sources like Google Reader, Bloglines, RSS Bandit or Windows Common Feed List directly.

Windows users who are looking for an RSS feed reader for their operating system should definitely give FeedDemon 3 a try. The download is provided at the developer’s website. It is compatible with Windows XP or later.

Google Reader

Reader’s the center of all my information consumption, but previously wasn’t so good at letting you share that information. If you wanted to bookmark something, or share a cool article with a friend, your options were limited. You’d either star an item, and then come back to it later, or you’d share it – but then only other Google Reader users could see it, and then that was only if you were friends on Google Reader. Which I have, like, three of.

But Google, always in sync with my needs (we have a wonderful and functional relationship, Google and I), has just released a “Send To” feature for Reader. Send To lets you share an article via Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, (though those are sort of the same now, huh?) Digg, Posterous, and many more.

To set this up, open Reader. At the top right of the page, click “Settings.” You’ll then see a tab in Settings called “Send To.” Click it. Then, select the service or services you want to add to your Send To… menu in Reader.

The list is long, but you’re not limited to it. With a bit of know-how, you can create a custom link that’ll let you send the Reader item to any service or website you can dream up – the link to do that is at the bottom of the “Send To” Settings page.

People are already starting to cook these up. There’s a way to send from Google Reader to Evernote; a way to send to Instapaper; a way to send to ShareThis (which has every social network you can imagine), and many, many more. A little Googling, and I’m betting you can add anything you can think of.

Once you’re all set up, sending items can be done in two ways. You can either go to the end of an item, and click the “Send To” button, which brings up a dropdown menu of all your options; or, hit Shift-T to open the same menu for the current item. I use the keyboard shortcut all the time (I heart keyboard shortcuts), and it’s definitely the fastest solution.

Whether you use Delicious, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, or just about anything else, you can now send directly to it from Google Reader – skipping at least one step, and a whole bunch of hassle.

What’s your bookmarking and sharing method of choice?

RSS Xpress is another desktop rss reader that does not come with the functionality of the latest version of FeedDemon but provides users with an optimized interface that looks like those of desktop email clients. Users can import their feed lists from other applications right into the RSS reader which is available as a portable version as well.

The feeds are displayed in the left sidebar of the application. They can be grouped in folders or listed as single feeds. The top pane of the main window contains the feed titles and other information while the lower pane displays the feed message. Some feeds are not displayed fully which is rather strange considering that they are displayed with their full text in other feed readers. It comes with filtering and notification options but stays pretty basic otherwise.

The main benefits of RSS Xpress are that it is available as a portable software program and that it is easy to use without all the advanced features offered by other feed readers. It does however require the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 which is included in Windows Vista and later and should be installed on most Windows XP systems as well. Users who like advanced features might want to take a look at the latest FeedDemon beta version or Google Reader.

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.

Google Redesigned (via Lifehacker) changes the style and layout of Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader. It places an icon in the status bar of the web browser that can be right-clicked to deactivate the extension for each service individually but also to view the source code which leads to the latest CSS file located on the servers of the developers. This is probably only interesting for a handful of users though. The Google websites that are supported will look completely different beginning with the login screen.

But also the main pages of the services have been redesigned.

The functionality of the Google services is not changed in any way. Some element dimensions have been changed to provide a better experience to the user but if it was there before it will be there after the installation as well.

Google Redesigned is a work in progress. It will appeal to users who do not like the default design of Gmail, Google Reader or Google Calendar. Users should not notice any page loading time differences.

FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 comes with several interesting new features and also one drawback which will be addressed later on. The short setup wizard will be started even if an older FeedDemon version is installed on the computer system. This might confuse users as it could seem that all feeds that have been added to that version have been lost during the upgrade. This is however not the case. The old feeds will be integrated into the new version. This takes some time as the feed items are imported and the databases checked.

The first thing that springs to mind is the new interface that looks friendly to the eye. The RSS feeds are still listed in the left sidebar and the contents in the main right window. A new addition is a small advertising window at the bottom left of the screen. That’s the drawback that I mentioned earlier on in the article. The advertisement is not really that obtrusive but could irritate or annoy some of the users.

A lot of new features have been added to this version of FeedDemon including tagging support for items which can be synchronized with Newsgator and displayed in various ways including a tag cloud at the Subscriptions Homepage. Multiple new features have been added for Twitter users like subscribing to Twitter feeds with avatar images, Twitter timelines, balloon popups for short urls that display the redirected page, replying to Twitter posts directly, automatic hyperlinking of information in Twitter feeds, the ability to send links to Twitter and even a Twitter search engine.

That’s a lot of additions for Twitter users but that’s only a tiny fraction of all the new features of FeedDemon. Users can now import Google Reader subscriptions directly but still no Google Reader synchronization. This feature is planned and it might be released in upcoming versions of FeedDemon 3.

Performance has been improved quite a bit especially when searching subscriptions or browsing popular topics. There are two interesting – and new – export options available. The first will export feeds in newspaper format into an external html document. Excellent for sending someone else a compilation of interesting feeds in that format. The second is to export the top feeds only.

Interested users can take a look at the full changelog of FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 here. This is also the location from where the RSS reader can be downloaded to the local computer system.

The service displays keyword trends and examples like iPhone, Obama or Superbowl that can be clicked on to perform the search as well. Spy will search its index for occurrences of the entered or clicked on keyword. It uses Ajax to update the search screen automatically. Search results are ordered by relevance.

The service makes use of two display modes. Poster mode makes use of speech bubbles displaying user avatars and the messages.

While Spy is not the most thorough search engine out there it can be used for several purposes. It can be used to read reactions on blog posts or follow conversations about recent events.

A userscript compatible browser is needed for the new interface theme to work. Long time users of Google Reader will need a few minutes before they grow accustomed to the changes. Many would call them drastic and some might say that it is to minimalistic.

At its ore lies a CSS file that can be used to customize the display further to suit individual needs. The main advantage of this userscript is that it puts the focus on the feed items by removing unnecessary buttons and items in Google Reader.

Helvetireader is a project in development. Interested users can follow the development process on the project’s homepage or on Twitter.

I usually fired up Google Reader and kept it open all the time to read new RSS feeds. The problem with that approach was that this meant that I was always logged into my Google account. The Google account was used for other Google services as well. Having read about Gmail and Google vulnerabilities before I decided that it would be best to move from Google Reader to another client to prevent that the account data would fall into the wrong hands. Yes, the likelihood was not very high but the chance existed.

Newzie was one of the first RSS readers that I evaluated and I immediately liked it. It was easy to import the opml file from Google Reader into Newzie so that all of the subscribed feeds would be available in the new RSS reader as well.

The default display mode of this RSS reader is to sort feeds by the time they were last updated with the most recently updated feeds at the top of the list. This view can be changed to a folder mode that simply lists all feeds alphabetically in their folders. The order of the feeds can be changed and the visibility of the complete menu can be toggled to increase screen size for the actual news items.

The RSS feeds are displayed in their own browser-like interface. A click on a title or link will load that link in a new tab in the Newzie interface. This is actually one of my complaints that I have with the RSS reader. I would have preferred that links would open in the default browser instead but I guess many users will think that reading them right in the RSS reader might be the more comfortable way. There is actually an option to load the link externally but it is hidden in a submenu.

The main interface provides access to three view modes:

Report View: Will only display new feed items filling out the complete interface
List View: Will divide the main interface into an upper panel that is displaying the RSS items and a lower panel that is displaying the contents of the active item.
List View 2: Like the first Live View only that the contents are divided vertically and that the RSS items are sorted by date

All posts can be marked read, deleted, flagged or copied / moved.

One interesting feature of Newzie is the ability to look at the news items of a particular feed by hovering the mouse over the feed. This makes it possible to quickly look at new items that have been posted without having to actually load the feed.

New items can be filtered right from the main interface using so called on-the-fly filtering. Commands like title=name would list all posts with name being part of their titles. Other filters make it possible to view only posts that have been updated before, at or after a certain period in time, posts that have been posted in a specific folder or posts that have a certain priority associated with them.

There is also a second interesting option which makes it possible to create so called virtual channels which apply word filters to RSS feeds. It would be possible to create a virtual channel that would contain all posts that would contain “portable software” in the body. It is currently only possible to apply those filters to the title, body or all of the news item. These filters can be combined by using AND or OR relations. It would be nice to see support for other information like author or tags added to the filter in the future.

Newzie offers another interesting related feature. It can monitor websites even if they do not offer an RSS feed. It can monitor any website for any kind of changes or specific changes. Specific changes can be words, text segments, links or images. Those monitored websites would then be added to the same menu containing the RSS feeds.

Other features Newzie is offering:

• Statistics
• Newsticker
• Monitoring IE favorites
• Feed priorities

A few more options to customize the RSS reader would be helpful. This would include the option to load links in the default web browser by default, an option to always display only the titles of the items in the overview and the ability to filter additional variables like author or tags.

But when it comes to feeds no such thing existed. You could visit the website whenever a new feed would be published, copy the url and paste it into some translation service but that was not very practicable especially for large websites with lots of news updates.

The Google Reader team implemented Google Translate into Google Reader which is now available for anyone to use. That should get rid of most of the hassle. It’s actually pretty easy and straightforward to use. Lets take the Genbeta feed for instance. Genbeta is a Spanish news site that covers Internet news. They sometimes have great news stories which anyone who does not speak Spanish or a related language does not understand. So it was all about the links and titles that they posted until now.

Now it is possible to select automatic translation of the website’s contents into the user’s language. All that needs to be done for this to happen is to click on the Feed Settings button in the upper right corner of the Google Reader screen and to check the Translate Into My Language entry.

The RSS news feed will be automatically reloaded and translated into the default language of the user if that is possible. Google Translate does not support all language translations which might mean that you could be stuck with translating a feed into English instead of your own language.

Rarst posted a process on his own website that makes it possible to check all feeds for dead links. The process can be broken down to exporting all feeds in an opml file, extracting the links into a new text file and checking the links with a link checker.

Some feed readers might provide an easier way of discovering dead blogs either because the owner abandoned it or deleted the website completely. Google Reader for one is offering a feature called Subscription trends which show inactive feeds. Users have to click on the Trends link in the top left menu and choose the inactive tab under Subscription trends to get there.

The user can display the top 10, top 20 or top 40 inactive blogs. The name of the blog and the data of the last update is shown in the menu afterwards. It is then easy to unsubscribe to blogs that have not been updated by clicking on the trashcan icon.

The only way to enable alphabetically sorting again was to create new folders and add the feeds to them. New folders sort the items alphabetically by default.

A comment by Fernando mentioned that Google added a new Options links beneath the feed list next to Manage Subscriptions in Google Reader that makes it possible to select the default method of sorting the feeds. The option can be set to “alphabetical” or “my order”. Selecting alphabetical will sort all feeds alphabetical again. One interesting aspect of the choice is that users who choose alphabetical will not be able to move feeds around in the same folder in Google Reader. It is still possible to move them to another folder though.

If alphabetical has been selected as the default sorting option then the feed items will stay alphabetical in their folder and new items will automatically assume the correct alphabetical position in the folder that they are moved into.

This finally gives everyone who was frantically looking for a way to enable alphabetical sorting in Google Reader a way to enable it again.

Users should not confuse that behavior with the temporary addition of new feeds to the bottom of the folder they have been put into. Once a user logs out and in again the feeds are sorted alphabetically again.

Google Reader offers no “sort” button that would make it possible to sort the feeds alphabetically again if the user started dragging and dropping around feeds previously. If you are one of those desperate users who want their feeds to be sorted alphabetically again read on.

The sorting setting in Google Reader is folder based. This means that creating a new folder and moving the RSS news feeds to that new folder will do the trick. It still requires some manual work on behalf of the user but it is actually the only way enable to sort the feeds alphabetically again.

Now here is what you do. The left pane shows a Manage Subscriptions. A click on that loads all the RSS News Feeds that the user has added to Google Reader.

New folders can be created by clicking on the Change Folders pulldown menu and selecting the New Folder option.

And enter a name for the new folder.

The next step depends on the following. If you have been using folders before you can filter by those folders at the top right corner so that only the items of one folder are showing up.

That ensures that all rss news feeds that have been in a folder are displayed on screen and that they can be moved to the new folder without the other feeds interfering in the display.

A click on Change Folders next to each feed that is displayed makes it possible to select the newly created folder. Once all feeds that belong to a folder have been moved into the new one the old one can be removed the same way. Going back to the main page of Google Reader will show the feeds sorted alphabetically.

It sometimes is required to logout and login before they show up sorted but it is definitely working that way. If a user has not been using folders before he has to start using at least one folder for all the RSS news feeds so that they show up sorted again.

It is also important to note that feeds should not be dragged and dropped into folders anymore. The proper way of moving them to another folder is to use the Change Folder menu which appears in Manage Subscriptions and when clicking on the RSS News Feed itself in the main interface.

The first thing that I was frantically searching for was a way to sort the subscriptions alphabetically in Google Reader. After searching through all settings and various Internet search engines I came up with nothing. Yes, that’s right. There is no way to sort the subscriptions automatically in Google Reader.

The only thing that you can do is drag and drop them around so that they are listed in alphabetical order. Imagine doing that with 200+ RSS News Feeds. That would take a while. Most users probably import their first batch of RSS News Feeds using an OPML file which could be sorted alphabetically.

Every new entry to Google Reader on the other hand is added at the bottom after each folder and existing subscription which means it has to be manually dragged and dropped into the right location.

I was recently looking for one specific feed that I subscribed to and it took me almost a minute to locate it because the subscribed feeds could not be sorted properly.

Exporting and importing the RSS News Feeds does not help either unless they would be imported into an application that provides access to a “sort” function that can sort the feeds alphabetically. That would on the other hand be much work and something that had to be done regularly.