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Google has been on an integration spree for quiet a while now. First they integrated Google Talk with Youtube, so users could view Youtube videos in Google Talk instead of sending strange and crypted urls. Then they launched MyMaps allowing users to create personalized maps and immediately integrated the User Generated Maps into Google Local Search Results. Then we heard reports about the on going integration of the presentation app they acquired with Gmail and now they have announced the Google Reader and Gmail Integration.
Google Reader now has an “Email” at the bottom of each feed item, which allows users to:
- Send email from within Reader without even opening a second window.
- Send the entire item as it appears in Reader, including formatting and images.
- Use their Gmail address book to add contacts with auto-complete.
So now you could share interesting news items with your non-techie friends who don’t use a feed reader. But if you want to convert them into using a feed reader, you could do so by showing them this simple explanatory video about feeds and tell them that even supermarkets are now Web 2.0 compliant.
Update: While I was writing this post, I was thinking instead of allowing tech savvy people to occasionally send important news items to their friends, why not just integrate the Google Reader and Gmail completely, enabling Gmail users to subscribe to feeds from Gmail and read them in Gmail. I would actually shift to Gmail if such a feature is offered. It would also make sense to show all the posts that are related to a specific news in one conversation, enabling me to quickly skim through what all of my favorite bloggers are saying on a particular issue. But won’t this make Google a competitor to Feedburner as well, anyone ?
It is still just a half assed solution. Like most other Google-related products lately it is a poor implementation of what could have been a good idea.
They need to integrate Reader into Gmail …not the other way around. I want to read my mail and read my feeds in the same screen. I am able to do this with Firefox and the Greasemonkey script, but Google should allow this without this kind of “hack”.
If you use FireFox, there is a Greasemonkey script called Gmail + Reader Integrator, it allows you to view Reader feeds from within Gmail. Don’t think you can subscribe to feeds from within Gmail, but otherwise it does pretty much what you want.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7435