Monday, December 3, 2007

Google Reader Improves Feed Management


Google Reader now shows a list of recommended feeds in the new Discover section. The list is generated by looking at the subscribed feeds from other people that have similar interests with you. I'm pretty satisfied with my recommendations, although I knew most of the blogs from that list.

"Your recommendations list is automatically generated. It takes into account the feeds you're already subscribed to, as well as information from your Web History, including your location. Aggregated across many users, this information can indicate which feeds are popular among people with similar interests. For instance, if a lot of people subscribe to feeds about both peanut butter and jelly, and you only subscribe to feeds about peanut butter, Reader will recommend that you try some jelly."

To decide if you want to subscribe to the feed, you can look at the number of Google subscribers, the frequency of posts or preview it.


But the most important update is that you can now manage your feeds in the sidebar using drag and drop. This allows you to move a feed to a new folder, to change its position inside a folder or to change the order of folders, if you don't like the alphabetical order. For some reason, there's still no option to rename folders and tags.