[Google] Updates to Reader and Others

This has been a rather busy week for Google. Apart from the fact that they celebrated their eighth birthday this week, we've been seeing a steady stream of updates to a variety of Google services.

Some of the more notable ones have been:

• New features for Google Notebook such as sharing, better drag and drop, a trash bin and others
  
• Google Calendar was enhanced with web content events which can display the phases of the moon or local holidays on your caledar
  
• Five more cities were added to Google Transit, a service previously limited to Portland, Oregon
  
• Google Talk is now open to the public so anyone can sign up for the service.

What is Google up to eh? We've seen more updates in this week compared to some previous months!



The change that struck me the most is the redesign of Google Reader just today, which has been long overdue considering how Google Reader has often been critisized as being all but forgotten in recent times. As discussed in the Official Google Blog and in the Official Google Reader Blog, the current paradigm around Reader has shifted to it being, "...your inbox for the web..." - definitely a nice advertising sound bite if I ever heard / read one. The structure is designed precisely like that - making the reader ressemble an email inbox highlighting how many items are unread (even in the window's title bar) and based on your labels which are arranged like folders.

The Google Operating System blog compares the new layout to Bloglines, which isn't a bad thing - it really is a change that should have been made ages ago.

As a Google Reader user myself, I welcome the changes. It's a lot more intuitive and the new arrangement makes one-click reading with the Space bar truly possible. I just wish they could do something about the additional load time I'm currently experiencing, even while using my office's broadband connection.

And of course there's that ultimate Google wish-list item - full integration into GMail.