14 DAY TRIAL // I?ve often noticed that the feeds that I subscribed for didn?t reach me in time, so I wandered what might be the cause for this. Easy question to answer, the "fault" was Google?s, who indexed the posts quite late, with a difference of hours sometimes. Now, the Reader team has put together a tooltip to display the "published" date next to the snippet, and that can only make obsessive freaks that need to know everything, such as myself, happy.
It?s a very good way to know whether you?ll be among the first to find something out, or if you?re as late as the rest of the crowd. Everybody loves to let others know about things that they?ve "discovered" and if you tell them that it?s old news, you can really see their jaw dropping. The difference between the two dates is quite big, as I said, ranging from one minute to ten hours (the most I?ve seen myself) and the only way to counter the situation is to visit the pages you?re waiting to hear from for yourself. Not a viable option if you?re subscribed to at least a dozen sites.
Apart from that, the Google Reader team has also made some interesting additions, such as a new confirmation dialog when clicking the "Mark all as read" button, and some new shortcuts, accessible when you type "?" in the main page of the Reader, as Ionut Alex. Chitu of googlesystem.blogspot.com noticed. You have "a" if you want to add a subscription, "g+d" if you want to open the feed directory and "e" if you want to mail the current item.
Going back to the "Mark as read" button, for a very short period of time there was an "Are you sure you want to mark all as read?" pop-up, but it quickly went away when people complained about it on the Google Groups site.
