Read News Through a Tiny Gadget

Once in a while, the Google team tries to promote their tiny gadgets by adding interoperability with another solution powered by the company or by revealing a new feature for them.

Recently, Google introduced the Google Talk gadget that allows users to communicate with their friends straight from the Personalized Homepage interface, without having to download any program. Today, Mihai Parparita, Google Reader team, presents a new gadget able to replace Google Reader, allowing users to read feeds from the page.

As usually, the gadget is available for free and is compatible with Google Personalized Homepage, allowing you to read latest news from Google Reader using a drop-down menu and a small interface. The Google employee also mentioned the improvements included in the latest release of the gadget, most of them concerning the organize function over the feeds:

- A "mark all as read" link so you can more easily catch up;
- Unread counts for your reading list and tags;
- Better support for themes;
- The ability to sort items, oldest-first.

Since the release of the gadgets, Google tried to promote them periodically, the utilities representing an important attraction for the users that are looking to work along with the search giant's employees. At this time, the company allows users to design their own gadgets and upload them to a separate page to make the utilities available for download. Google Desktop is another gadget-compatible application but it is entirely downloadable, both the stand-alone program and the gadgets being available for download. Google Desktop is a program that allows users to search their computers for any type of file or information, being released in a Mac flavor last week on Thursday.