Attack of the interns: recommendations and drag-and-drop
One of the great things about Reader, and feed readers in general, is that they let you follow sites much more efficiently than you could just by visiting them directly. This means that once you get into the flow of it …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands three weeks after the Reader team's write-up of how 20% projects feed the product — and the follow-up comes from interns rather than full-timers, reinforcing the point that Reader's fall 2007 feature cadence runs on Google's side-project culture. Both additions are interface-and-discovery moves: recommendations surface sites to follow without users hunting for feeds themselves, while drag-and-drop cuts the friction out of managing subscriptions.
The pickup was unusually broad for a reader-feature note: TechCrunch and Search Engine Land both ran versions the same day, treating a feed-reader update as mainstream web news.
First-order effects
- Users get feed discovery built into the reader itself — recommendations remove the step of finding and submitting URLs by hand — and can reorder subscriptions directly instead of through a settings page.
- The Reader team ships two confirmed features in one release, extending the rapid cadence established by the November 2007 20%-project posts.
Second-order effects
- Discovery inside Reader makes the product more of a daily starting point than a passive organizer, raising the bar for competing feed readers to add their own recommendation layers or lose usage share.
- Broader tech-press attention of the kind TechCrunch and Search Engine Land gave this update converts incremental feature work into acquisition-funnel pressure for Reader against rival aggregators.
Third-order effects
- If recommendation-driven discovery sticks, feed reading shifts structurally from hand-curated subscription lists toward algorithmically suggested sources — the reader becoming a content-recommendation surface, with all the editorial-power questions that implies.
The trend: Feed readers are evolving from passive subscription managers into discovery platforms where algorithmic recommendations decide which sites get followed.