Shared vs Starred, Tags and Folders in Google Reader

A couple weeks ago, google reader came out with a new interface that is quite a bit better. The main thing it changed was moving away from a single river-o-news model to an "inbox for the web". This works much better when you subscribe to a lot of feeds. Others have written plenty about it.

After using it a bunch for two weeks, a couple more subtle yet crucial improvements have become apparent: a new notion of 'shared', and a distinction between tags and folders.

Shared vs Starred

I'll start with the shared vs. starred idea. Ever since the first version of reader, you could star individual items. This seemed relatively useful, let's say I like a story and want to remember it somehow: I'll star it. However, there was a major flaw: when I clicked to view all of my starred items, the list was empty. I had to click on "view unread items" to see the items I had starred and (obviously) read. Then, when clicking back to the original stream of my feeds, there would be a bunch of crap I had already read and I'd have to uncheck the 'show read' button.

Later on, still in the older version, they introduced sharing. You could share your starred items and send a feed to your friends. My brother could subscribe to my starred items in his reader and automatically see what I had found interesting. Now, for the first time, stars were useful. However, they still sucked for remembering stories I wanted to maybe go back and read later.

In the latest version of reader, this problem is solved: starred has gone back to the meaning it has in gmail: flag this to make not of it to myself somehow. I can still share my starred items if I want to, but there is another feature for that purpose: my 'shared items'. Now, as I'm going though my stories, I'll hit the 'share' button on all the stories I think are interesting and want others to see, and star much more occasionally if I want to go back and read a particular story later on. I can click on a button to see my starred stories and it will show them (even though they are read); no need to 'show unread'. Yay!

Another nice feature about 'shared' items is reader automatically constructs a page for you to easily share with others, (see mine linked to as 'link blog' in the sidebar).

Tags vs Folders


Another thing that stunk about the old reader was that there was no difference between folders and tags; and they were both called 'labels'. You could label a feed, and label individual posts. But a labeled feed means all stories within that feed are labeled the same, so if any label used for feeds would overwhelm the individual stories labeled the same. I label slashdot as 'science', then, it's pointless to label any individual story 'science' because slashdot will always be spitting dozens of stories a day into that label.

With the new reader, 'label' is killed (with what seems to be some lingering references that are likely bugs in the UI). Google finally threw in the towel and started using the word 'tag' like everyone else (for reader at least), and distinguishes between categorizing your feeds (into folders), and further annotating individual stories (with tags). The folders help me quickly check out a bunch of related feeds within reader, and the tags help me occasionally further describe an individual story.