Google Reader Recommendations: Find Out What You’re Missing
Google has added a recommendation feature to Reader, the company’s RSS subscription service, and, even better, Google Reader now supports drag-and-drop actions for re-ordering and organizing your feeds.
The drag-and-drop features see Google Reader finally catching up with other popular online services like Bloglines and NewsGator, which have long supported drag-and-drop functionality. Not groundbreaking, but certainly welcome if you’re a Google Reader fan.
The new recommendations features can be found under the “Discover” link at the top of your feed list — note that if you’re using any sort of skin for Google Reader you may need to disable it to see the link.
Discover looks at your existing feed subscription list, as well as any web history data your might have stored and then churns out twenty new feeds that Google’s algorithms think you might enjoy. Each recommended feed displays information about the number of subscribers and the frequency of updates to the feed along with options to subscribe or reject the feed. Clicking on the feed link will display a preview the feed’s content with links to subscribe.
If you happen to be using something like the Trackmenot Firefox extension, which spews out bogus searches for Google’s search history, you could end up with a few strange recommendation, but on the whole all the feeds I saw were in line with my interests.
That said, I only found two recommended feeds that really grabbed me and one was something I actually thought I was already subscribed to. On the other hand, I work for Wired and I had no idea the main Wired News site offered the category-based feeds pictured above, so you just might learn a thing or two with Reader’s Discovery feature.
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