Bulky Google Reader

Google Reader is hands down on of the best ways of managing your feeds on the Internet at the moment and it's not budging an inch when confronted by similar products. It is able to land the top spot in the hearts of its users because unlike the same service coming from other web companies, it is constantly being worked upon, and that gets highlighted with every possible occasion.

Most of the features that have been added so far were not fully ready to hit the net when they were launched, but taking advantage of the feedback from all of its users (as opposed to a limited beta that cannot re-create the same usability circumstances), everything was slowly but skillfully honed to fit into the well-oiled working machine that the Reader is today. By pushing up front features still in the making, the team has showed everybody that it is attending to their needs as soon as possible, instead of promising something to come out with trumpets and either be a bust or have the release date pushed further back.

Google has brought some new additions to the Reader this very morning. The service is now available in more countries and languages: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland, Brazil, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.

Want to know whether you're hip or indie based on what your tastes in reading are? Nothing easier, the new subscriber count added in the "show details" link in the top-right corner will tell you that, and so will the "Most obscure" tab on the trends page. Some increased reading has also been made space for, by shuffling with the header area content. It's not much, only 17 pixels, but Mihai Parparita says that every little bit matters when consuming hundreds of posts a day, and I cannot disagree.

Bugs? Squashed! Fixes? Galore! The Reader will load faster from now on when you have more than a thousand subscriptions, and the settings page will impress you with its perkiness. The minor glitches a.k.a. bugs that prevented some pages from loading have been removed, and to top that, keyboard navigation has been taken to the next level. What more could you want from the Reader?