Googles Latest Web App Changes

Google has made some changes to their web apps in the last couple of days which I must say I am quite happy with. The ones that I have noticed have been the recent updates to Google Reader and Gmail.

Google Reader Update

The recent changes to Google Reader have seen some new features added to make it more focused around a Social Media tool. I have noticed three major features added which include the ability to follow people and be followed, create groups, and the ability to like others shared items.

First of all with the ability to follow people and be followed you can now not only follow RSS feeds or a specific blog, but individuals as well and they can follow you back. There are a multitude of benefits with this which you could probably understand these including you can now take it upon yourself to get your own RSS feed or friends RSS feeds out there to more people the ability to follow industry specific readers either for info and/or for the hope they follow you back and like your info, and just to meet new people with similar interests.

The second notable feature I discovered is that you can now break the people/feeds you follow into groups. For the purpose of to only sharing feeds with specific people (i.e similar interests or personal), organise your feeds into different categories and for marketing benefit it allows you to target specific groups of people with your feed.

The last changed I picked up with Google Reader was the ability to ‘like’ any article you can find in Reader. Great as a rating system for posts which I’m sure in one way or another would be added to Google’s search engine algorithm and/or a top rated list be incorporated into the Google Reader Home Screen . Benefit of this is obviously that getting your own posts shared in Google Reader and liked a lot with surely give you a lot of exposure, and as I just said possibly even improved organic rankings.

Gmail Update

Although this has been spread over a few weeks Google’s Gmail recent updates, for me have been a long time coming. The changes that I have noticed in the main email screen is the new ability to simply grab and move emails to different folders, making it a lot more efficient to organise my emails into folders.

They have also added a ‘Tasks’ feature which allows you to enter in your own tasks/to do list. I personally have been using this feature every day since I discovered it, getting rid of the wasteful post it’s I used to use. The feature has the ability to set the due date of tasks, check a box when it’s complete, add notes to a task, break tasks into different groups, filter, sort and also print your tasks.

It really is a great productive tool for getting things done as I have my Gmail inbox open all day and prefer to see a big tick there then an empty box.