14 DAY TRIAL // Google employees are allowed that 20% of the time they spend at work be spent towards personal projects that might prove to be useful to Google in the future. Creativity is as such encouraged and the feature implemented today is a result of this particular program that the Mountain View giant started.
The two engineers that came up with the idea explained it on the official Google Reader Blog: "As a blogger I like to include a blogroll on my site so that friends, family and other readers can take a look at what I like to read. It's also a nice way to give a shout out to the authors of the blogs that I like. However, maintaining a blogroll can be a bit of a pain as your subscriptions ebb and flow. As a heavy user of Google Reader, I figured that the best way to get a blogroll would be to have Reader generate it for me, based on my subscriptions. This didn't seem to hard, so I chatted to the Reader team and then set about implementing a this feature in my 20% time, " says Steve Lacey, the first of the two.
The second, Dolapo Falola, explains his part in all of it: "One of my favorite Google Reader features is the ability to read feeds on my mobile phone. I'm a New Yorker so I'm out and about quite a bit without a computer. [?]I've been taking advantage of this opportunity to add small (pun intended) features to Google Reader Mobile. Some of the more interesting features I've added are the ability to see trends data on which feeds are viewed on mobile, as well as the ability to change the number of items displayed at once, or disable reformatting linked web sites for mobile phones. The latter in particular is especially useful for iPhone and other smart phones that are capable of properly displaying sites."
This new feature will help spread the Google Reader technology across the web and give Google another data point about blogs and feeds which could become another factor for it to consider in its blog search algorithm. Score one for the bloggers and about 10 for Google on this.