Maybe if I keep talking about it as if it’s definitely going to be released, It will actually happen.

There is a Facebook app that works similarly, but I’m glad this functionality is now built in and is opt out, not opt in.

Note: I don’t consider this a privacy violation. You are ALREADY sharing these items with the public - Google is just making it easier to find your friends’ feeds.

I’ll look into adding this functionality to ReaderMini.

It looks like they announced a couple of days ago, but I don’t remember seeing it before today.

Changes in Release .9.1 - 1/14/07

• Text in feed list now lines up better.
• Brand new theme!
• Button locations have changed.
• No more (0) if a feed is stale.
• Bold text has been removed from the feed list.
• Fix: Hide/Show stale feeds now works again.
• Added rudimentary AJAX progress indicator to several buttons.
• Changed the icons for a few buttons - checkboxes everywhere!
• Fixed: Links from posts in category river views now work.
• FAQs, Credits added.
• Added a “Get Next Page” button. Works sometimes (normal feeds), but not others (starred items, shared items feeds, category feeds).

I see two big issues, though. The first is related to it’s handling of read items. I don’t think it can tell the difference between a feed that you constantly mark as read without actually reading any articles and a feed that you carefully read each item, very aware that when you hit J(next item), you’ll be marking each article read. So some forum feeds which I rarely browse are mixed with ones I actually read a lot (like www.scobleizer.com, Make Magazine and Engadget) in my most read list. To drive this point home, I’ll note that the trends page says “From your 93 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,771 items, starred 143 items, and shared 140 items.” I have not scrolled past 2,771 items this month. Er…. HAVE I?

The second big issue (for me) is that the new Trends page is yet another piece of Google Reader that doesn’t work on my Nokia 770 which has a VERY CAPABLE Opera browser. The page loads, but none of the tabs work.

I spent a few minutes looking into adding the Trends information into ReaderMini (my mobile front end to Google Reader), but it looks like I’ll have to translate a lot of links and I may have to include a bunch of CSS to get it working. I put it on the todo list and I’ll hopefully get to it this month.

The ‘inactive feeds’ list is very helpful and may lead to a recategorization of my feeds.

Update: I agree with Steve Rubel. I’d like to opt in for the ability to share my personal Google Reader trends with others. I’d even love to put some of the lists and charts in my blog sidebar. Meanwhile, Andrew Parker links to what end up being an excellent resource for finding apps like this. He calls them MyWare.

I don’t have a Mylo, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get something working.

Here is a screenshot of ReaderMini on a Nokia 770.

I made that change soon after I bought the device.

• Number of feeds is not a factor. The feed switch time doesn’t change a lot. I tried 2 accounts - one with dozens of feeds and one with 5. Got the same speeds.
• Initial startup time DOES seem to increase when using an account with lots of feeds.
• There is not much network access happening while feed switching is happening. This was confirmed by watching the output of a proxy that minimo was attached to.
• I’ve done some profiling of Google Reader on Firefox with Firebug on my desktop PC, but the code is all obfuscated, so it’s hard to tell if the operations taking the most time are doing what they need to do efficiently.

UPDATE: To get the 770’s version of Opera to work at all with Google Reader, you need to change a line in /home/user/.opera/opera.ini. Change SpoofUserAgent=3 to SpoofUserAgent=1. That will tell Opera to stop pretending it is IE6.

I’ve started using the sharing key. Here are my shared items: page, feed. I would like to add a blurb for each shared item, but that’s not a huge issue.

The library clips blog explained the ‘next bookmarklet’ more clearly than Google Reader’s help. “Another amazing feature is the Next bookmarklet, drag this to your links bar…whenever you are on the web and want to read new items on your Google Reader, you don’t even have to launch it. Just click “next” and that brings you to the native blog post of your newest unread item, then click next again, and again…reading your unread posts, like turning pages of a book (NOTE: these posts are automatically marked as read).” OK - I’ve GOT to try THAT!

I’ll have to add some new items to the list of features at AggCompare. For instance, clipping, nextNative. Also, AgileRSS just added a news ticker feature, so I’ll add that for comparison.

As a buyer, I might prefer Google Checkout over Paypal. Both services keep my cc# away from the seller AND give the seller no way to get money from me without my express permission. With Paypal, however, the seller gets my email address. With Google Checkout, I can keep that information private.

Unfortunately, Google Checkout doesn’t have a subscription payment option. I have 4 subscription payments with Paypal and it’s very handy. The merchant doesn’t have my cc#, but I don’t have to explicitly send the funds every month - Paypal handles that for me. Techcrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick raises that same concern.

For merchants, the decision to add Google Checkout is a no brainer. As with Paypal, there are customers who will prefer it over entering a credit card and the cost of integrating is probably worth picking up those extra customers. I don’t see any reason that either service will replace the need to accept credit cards, though. This line of thinking is the focus of the second half of the NYTimes article.

Thai points out that Google Merchant is not a Paypal killer. Yet. It does not include person-to-person transfers - it is not a bank. Because of that, it’s probably also not a great solution for micro payments.  [Update: Ars notes on 6/30/06 that Google never intended to compete with Paypal, so it intentionally left out person-to-person.  Interesting.]
I really like the “Review this Seller” concept. You can only submit a review 2 weeks after a purchase. I’m assuming that during the checkout process, buyers will see reviews for the merchant they are currently doing business with. That’s a pretty great idea!

Process:

• Went to checkout.google.com.
• Signed in with my gmail/google account username and password.
• Added my credit card number and address (don’t they HAVE this information already?).
• Went to buy.com.
• Added Horton Hears a Who to my shopping cart.
• Clicked the checout button on buy.com. [NOTE: I did not need to create a buy.com account.]
• Clicked the google checkout button on the buy.com checkout page.
• Was redirected to the google checkout system ‘review and place order’ page. [NOTE: Clicked the checkbox entitled ''Keep my email address confidential".]
• Clicked the ‘place order’ button.
• Got a receipt page. [NOTE: No link to get back to buy.com.]

As a bonus nice touch, when you switch to another machine and boot Firefox, the extension gives you a dialog asking which tabs you’d like to open - tabs from your last session on the previous machine.

I can’t wait to read all the nay sayers: “this feature should have been available from the start” and “Google definitely knows too much about me NOW”.

For a Firefox power user like me, this is HUGE news!

After some quick tests, it looks like it works like a charm!

LifeHacker has two articles of great coverage.

Google just announced that they are releasing a limited version of SketchUp for free!  Meanwhile, you can visit the 3D Warehouse to find everyone else’s (geographically-tagged) creations.

SketchUp is really easy to use.  I suggest watching a few of the videos to get started and then dive right in.  I made a Sonic Screwdriver 3D model in a few hours last month.

Render from SketchUp:

Henriks image:

Update: I just checked the PR of my old blog (blog.ronin64.com) which 301 redirects to this one. It’s PR is 0, also.

Update: The problem seems to be intermittent.  Sometimes the rank is 3-5 for child pages and sometimes it’s 0.  I’ll chalk it up as a false alarm for now. 

The Origami plot thickens with the found video and Om chastizes Palm for not doing it first (I totally agree).

The funny thing is that I was planning to compare MeasureMap (now Google Blog Stats?) to Google Analytics (used to be Urchin) in an upcoming post.  The biggest difference, fyi, is I don’t trust Google Analytics until the data has settled.  In other words, yesterday’s data is questionable until tomorrow(and then today’s data will be questionable).

We’re in this for the long haul. In the years to come, we’ll be making significant and growing investments in China. Our launch of google.cn, though filtered, is a necessary first step toward achieving a productive presence in a rapidly changing country that will be one of the world’s most important and dynamic for decades to come. To some people, a hard compromise may not feel as satisfying as a withdrawal on principle, but we believe it’s the best way to work toward the results we all desire.

I’ve been using it for several days(thanks John!!) and I agree with those comments. I’ve sent some specific bug reports and constructive feedback to Google, but the service is definitely usable, even in its beta stage. Fast searching of email is HUGE for me - I’m an email packrat. I hope they make a GMail appliance so I can index and seach my work email archives.