Download Squad

The blogosphere is all a-gaga over the latest version of Google Reader, after its somewhat lackluster first stab. And for good reason; as many people have pointed out, Google's infrastructure makes for a very fast experience. The way that Google Reader prefetches content as you read makes it unlikely that you are ever slowed down by the reader, which is simply fantastic. It also solves the biggest knock against Bloglines, which is that clicking on a feed doesn't immediately mark every post in that feed as read - they're only marked read as you scroll past them. In many ways, these seemingly minor upgrades to how we use a feed reader as similar to the seemingly minor ways that Gmail improved the email experience.

Of course, given the obvious similarities between Gmail and Google Reader, many users have already been wondering why they have not been fully integrated. It turns out that the Google Reader team has considered this, but it's not a simple task. In the words of Mihai Parparita, who is a member of the Google Reader team, "The answer is that integrations are hard and generally require a lot of effort before you can even determine if they are worthwhile. Greasemonkey lets you experiment with UI concepts with minimal effort necessary from either team."

So, as it turns out, Mihai has actually written a greasemonkey script that will integrate your Google Reader into Gmail, by adding a menu option at the left under Inbox called Feeds, which will load your Google Reader interface right in Gmail. The script is supposed to load the list view, without the feed list that you typically see on the left in Google Reader, to give you a quick way to check up on the latest feeds in your Google Reader account. For some reason, I'm getting the entire Google Reader screen replicated in the message area of my Gmail, which I'm sure is due to some other greasemonkey script I use with Gmail. In any event, it's very nice to have Google Reader content just a click away in my Gmail. Hopefully this becomes a full-blown integration sooner rather than later.

[Update] I figured out which Greasemonkey script wasn't playing nice - it turns out to be one called HTTP-to-HTTPS redirector script, which does exactly what you might think, redirects certain named sites to the secure version of their site. I had been using this to ensure that I was always using secure versions of both Gmail and Google Reader (bet you didn't know there was a secure version, eh?). Of course now that I've discovered the joys of having my Google Reader inside Gmail, I've turned off the offending redirector script. Maybe Mihai can make it work on the secure versions?