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Yesterday I thought it was a good idea to make some changes to the subscriptions in Google Reader. I created some new folders and moved all subscribed feeds to them. So far I had folders based on topics; now there are just seven folders indicating the blogs’ relevancy to my interests (from Must Read to The World Won’t Stop ;) ).

Since then I have two major problems:

  1. Google Reader is slow. I mean really slow. It takes ages scrolling down, it gets stuck in between all the time. Switching to settings (and managing tags, subscriptions,…) is equally slow.
  2. So far it’s been possible to see read items in a folder or in the subscribed feed when scrolling down. That’s not possible anymore. Luckily search still seems to work properly.

I haven’t changed any settings so I have no idea what’s wrong. Is there anyone having similar problems? Any solutions?

Managing tasks with Gmail? Absolutely, it just needed some proper implementation and Remember The Milk (RTM) has done a great job. You just have to download a Firefox add-on and you will discover a new pane on the right side of the Gmail page which looks like this:

task pane

All your tasks are listed there and you can sort them by priority, due date or name. If you think this view didn’t reveal much information about tasks you’re right, of course. Although task details are hidden, RTM developers have found a rather elegant solution to gain access to them quickly: just hover over any task and you will be able to see and edit all details you already know and love from RTM.

task_details

It goes without saying that you cannot only view and edit tasks but you can add them directly in Gmail as well. There are two pretty cool options in the Gmail settings now which create tasks automatically when you star a message or label it with a pre-defined label. Especially creating a task when starring a message is really neat. Often people’s emails include tasks like making a phone call, asking for a report, deadlines,… So I just have to star the message and a new task is added to RTM. Cool.

Also RTM is connected with your Gmail contacts. Whenever you start entering a task starting with email, call,… you’ll see a type ahead box and can choose a contact from there. So if you send the email the task will be completed.
Google Calendar integration has also been added but I don’t use it. I am confident that it works well, though.

RTM has always been a great application. Gmail integration makes it even more powerful and distinguishes it from competitors. Usually I had constantly two tabs open in Firefox: Gmail and RTM. Now I only need one tab for Gmail which helps keeping track of open tabs and makes me more productive.

share When I had a look at Google Reader this morning I was surprised by an image on the start page (displayed on the left).

Google Reader and Google Talk are a little bit more integrated by now, so users of Google Reader can see the shared items of their Google Talk contacts more easily.

Of course, it has been possible to subscribe to everybody’s shared items before via RSS. Though people had to add those feeds manually to their feed reader. Now they are able to see their friends’ items in one convenient place.

friends

Unfortunately only a few friends of mine are using Google Talk and none of those is using Google Reader, so this new feature isn’t really important to me at the moment. It was more useful to me if Google extended this integration to AIM as well; similarly to the way it integrated AIM in Gmail.

If you have read any tech blog this week you could not miss the news: Google’s OpenSocial has gone live on Thursday. Considering the flood of posts about it one could easily think it was revolutionary.

So what is it about? Well, as far as I can tell, OpenSocial is a set of API’s for building applications that work on multiple websites which support them. In short terms: Widgets which could work everywhere.

Is the storm in the blogosphere justified? I don’t think so. There are just two benefits:

  1. No proprietary code is used (just HTML and Javascript), so it’s more comfortable to develop applications that can run everywhere.
  2. Every website can run those applications.

So yes, that’s different to Facebook where developers have to learn new proprietary code, though applications only run on Facebook itself. And that’s what it boils down to: Competition to Facebook, especially when considering the launch partners which include social networking sites like MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Friendster, and many more.

But are users benefitting from OpenSocial? Only if they want to run widgets on more than one social network, I think. OpenSocial is no solution to social network portability. I don’t even think that problem is targeted at all by it (see also Tantek Çelik’s post). That’s disappointing.

If you want to read more about OpenSocial I recommend these blog posts:

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