Perhaps the biggest barrier to entry to using a feed reader for most people is building up a collection of good feeds. Sure, you can import someone else’s OPML file, but most people have no idea what that means, let alone how to do it. The “Browse for stuff” area of Google Reader is a better solution, as it offers a front-end way to subscribe to some suggested feed. But up until now those have been suggested by Google. Starting today, you and your friends on Google Reader can make your own bundles and share them.
And creating these bundles couldn’t be easier. You simply click on the “Create a bundle” button in the same “Browse for stuff” area, and you are given an area on the page in which you can simply drag and drop the feeds you wish to add into this bundle. You then name the bundle and give it a description, and you’re all set. If you choose to add the bundle to your shared items, you friends on Google Reader will see them.
This is a very good idea by Google. Quite often I get asked by non-tech friends what feeds they should subscribe to for various news. Usually that involves me hunting down the RSS links for each site I want to recommend. But now I can simply share a whole bunch of feeds, all packaged together with a few clicks. I’m still not sold on Google Reader’s overall social philosophy, and I think TechCrunchIT’s Steve Gillmor has a lot of good points about the viability of a straight-up feed reader like Google Reader against something like Twitter going forward — for mainstream usage. But I’ll give credit where it’s due. Even if browsing “your friends’ bundles,” sounds a bit dirty.
that’s awesome and I’m loving to try this out.
Yes, a cool feature. I’m trying it out too.
Yes it is very cool. I having been using it for a while. Many people use it to read my Stock Traders Blog too
It’s a no brainer. Content discovery has always been a problem. There’s too much out there. As Clay Shirky said, “it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.” I want to read what the people I’m interested in are reading. They’re my filter.
We’ve had this functionality built in to Yomomedia for almost 2 years now.
Now a bundle you can share, huh. The feature is quite useful for a media junkie. But overall, it hardly goes beyond that function though. I’m waiting something better and more powerful from Google–something that will kill Twitter.
Oh… This will be good. I just started using the GR bookmarklet too. I think RSS readers are a lot like what the web was like circa Mosaic before marca created IMG etc… The more we can layer and make it have a packaged topical and -timely- appeal the more useful it will be against a sea of reference materials that make up the wiki web of a default Google search today.
can you just stop you Google bias.. after the 5th article this day it’s getting somewhat boring…
And your articles are just not taken serious anymore…
Siegler FAIL
can you stop the bias bias?
No more GOOG stories! I am sick of it.
i am sick of the lack of sickness about twitter stories now. more are needed, apparently.
++
Hey MG, will you REALLY give credit where its due ?
Last Feb, me and my team launched a web-based RSS feed reader called Alertle. It had the exact same feature which you just described Google Reader has launched. Don’t believe me ? Check out http://www.alertle.com and see the demo and the date.
This is what we were doing – we had a feature called “Feedpacks” – where users could create a ‘feedpack’, add feeds to it and share it with other users. Other users were then also able to subscribe to public feedpacks. We spent a lot of time in getting this right. And of course, when we launched, I do remember seeing folks from the Google Reader team checking out Alertle.
Not to say that Google Reader ripped off Alertle here – I guess it always happens on the web where two different teams come up with the same idea – but hey, a 5 member team working from their basement launched this feature a full year ago before the mighty Google
You should definitely move on.
MG wrote in this article “This is a very good idea by Google” and “I’ll give credit where it’s due” so I thought I’d test those statements out
Over 2 yrs ago, my startup came up with this same “shareable feed bundles” idea, we implemented it (called it ‘feedpacks’), launched it as a core feature of Alertle version 1.0 in Feb ‘08, various tech blogs wrote about us and we also logged visits by folks on the Google Reader team checking out Alertle. Now, 14 months after that, here we are.
good feature.
nothing new… also known as playlists and blog category feeds, opml etc.
but def good to have added func in google reader.
Steve Gillmor’s post was entertianing to read…. some interesting points that may matter to some users. but overall comparing google reader and twitter is nonsense. you can have some overlapping benefits but they both serve users differently. and to go beyond the comparison… saying RSS itself is dead… that’s just attention grabbing and being drunk on the hype of real-time live-streaming data.
nice feature. love it!
Great idea, and good post on how to use this functionality! thanks again
LOL boyee…lol
Other services that do this let you export the group of feeds as RSS and as a search page. This implementation doesn’t seem as good.
Great idea, thanks
I can recommend this feed to everyone:
http://blogosco.../google/rss.xml
Mixed feed of all Google related, Yahoo and Microsoft blogs.
Yet another feature for feed, hope this one makes the life better for feeds. There are so many feeds in my reader that i can publish a book everyday.
Would love to create my own feed on Google.
It’s a great idea! Google will do really well because its highly addictive to look at what others are reading.
We know a little about this because Mippin launched “Social Content Discovery” for mobile last October; we launched with a video that highlights how users can discovery what “feed bundles” others are reading and use a “Similarity Meter” to find cool new feeds via people with similar interests. The whole team starred in it. The high heels were just a perk
http://www.tinyurl.com/o2xo42
Really doesn’t seem like that great a feature, but i’ve been so underwhelmed by Google Readers progress I jumped ship long ago and built one for myself.
For those people who have friends that DON’T use Google for everything (yes, they exist), it isn’t hard to parse OPML files yourself using python. I’ve outlined it at http://notestos...arse-opml-files
good feature.
nothing new… also known as playlists and blog category feeds, opml etc.
but def good to have added func in google reader.
Steve Gillmor’s post was entertianing to read…. some interesting points that may matter to some users. but overall comparing google reader and twitter is nonsense. you can have some overlapping benefits but they both serve users differently. and to go beyond the comparison… saying RSS itself is dead… that’s just attention grabbing and being drunk on the hype of real-time live-streaming data.
I still want to see a “whats popular” integration in Reader… I’m ready to not just share with friends but to have me and my friends all vote.
This would be great for industry research also. A small team could tear through thousands of articles as part a continuous scanning process.