Google Reader taking the day off?

by on February 19, 2007

Google Reader has been having problems all weekend long and I haven’t seen any bloggers talking about them. Why is that? Because the reader part is working great. But the “sharing” part? Everytime today I try to share an item with you I’m getting an error. Is Google hitting scalability problems with its Reader?

Can a few more of those smart PhD’s please help out the Reader team and get the problem fixed? Thanks!

But, I guess it’s fair. Many USA workers are taking the day off because of President’s day.

UPDATE: my readers all said it was working great for them, then one guy said “clean out the browser cache.” I did that, and now it’s working again. I’m using Firefox. Weird that that would make this stuff start working again (I deleted everything, cookies, cache, history, etc).

  • Mitch, the fix should now be live.
  • Mitch, we're aware of the problem and should have a fix out soon. Sorry about that.

    Mihai Parparita
    Google Reader Engineer
  • Mitch
    As of March 15, 2007 Google Reader does not work with Netscape 7.2 or Firefox.
  • I use the share feature extensively ... I haven't encountered that problem, but get the occasional 'oops'.
    I am not a coder, but is it possible that all the AJAX tools clog up the browser periodically? I get that sense sometimes. I am always on gmail, and Reader.
  • George S.
    1) Clearing your cache corrects the problem, but this still is bug from the reader. It will happen again to you or other users who share so many items like you.

    2) You were the only one to report this problem because none else really uses this feature ...or because no one else wants to report something bad about this reader. Even you were a softy when you interviewed the reader team. Whatever this company announces for this application immediately gets on techmeme's front page, even if it's something totally trivial.
  • Not having any issues either...

    Plus, even if it is a bug.. they deserve a holiday weekend too.
  • Robert: Sometimes bugs lie dormant, waiting for big, fat holidays to pounce on and I'm grateful this wasn't one of those. Glad to see you're back in working shape.
  • JB
    Well Gmail has been on vacation for awhile. E-mails are delivered 12-24 hours after they have been sent. No response on Gmail message boards, nothing. Getting annoying.
  • Chris: it was a problem with Firefox. I cleaned out my cache and now everything is working again.
  • Robert, with your permission I can take a look at your account. This probably involves my attempting to share items which, if successful, would appear briefly for a few seconds on your shared items page then disappear.
  • Robert: that seems to have fixed my problems. Very weird.
  • May want to try the obvious and clear your browsers cache.

    I haven't seen any problems in a while. Everything has been top quality.
  • No issues at this end either. Used it quite a bit over the weekend.
  • I haven't seen any of those problems, and I have been using it all weekend and successfully sharing, etc. Does Google segment servers geographically? Maybe your closest server is hosed but mine isn't? I dunoo, just guessing.
  • Weird, I've been trying Reader every few minutes and I'm still getting the error. Must be a server I get routed to, that you aren't getting routed to. I wonder how this all works. Or, in the case of my Reader today, doesn't.
  • My link blog is a filter. It tells you what I found interesting. In the past 30 days I've put about 1,100 items on my link blog. I'm not about to write that many posts here.

    What I'm trying to do is save you the time of watching 540 feeds (which is about 28,000 posts per month). Instead, I'll bring you the best stuff of those 540 feeds on my link blog (which is about 1,100 posts per month).

    It's a lot easier to read 1,100 posts a month than 28,000.
  • Haven't noticed a problem on my end, Robert.

    Maybe Reader is slacking off for President's Day. :)
  • Robert,

    I wouldn't know as I have given up on Google Reader and gone back to my trusty NetNewsWire. GReader is okay but I like having my reading offline (hey, it happens sometimes).

    Besides, I have come to despise the "shared" list of endless links. If you want me to read about something, link to it in a blog post and tell me why it is interesting enough to warrant my time. Just adding hundreds of links to things you think are worthy of a click but not a mention is wasting my time.

    Jeff
  • no problems here on sharing.
  • Works fine from here....
  • Brian -- there is a Google Group for talking about problems you might be having with Google Reader. I've personally been really impressed with how quickly Google has responded to concerns raised there (mine and others).

    That said, if you're getting an "Oops", I can pretty much assure you they know about it. Those things normally get logged ;)
  • I often get the dreaded red "ooops ... whatever" message when scrolling through messages. It seems to clear after a few messages lately so I mostly ignore it.

    That is a change from a week or so ago where the message would come and just never go away until I refreshed the page (of course then I had to mark a bunch of stuff read manually).

    I occasionally have problems where a message count "sticks" showing x unread messages when there are none -- the only way to clear this is to go to the folder that Reader thinks contains a message and mark all as read.

    One think that sucks with Google even when things are in the "perpetual beta" stage is there no way to report these problems - suffering and whining (in your case blogging is probably a call to action) is about all I can do.
  • I've seen problems from time to time over the last few months, but not today. Maybe it's a problem with a specific server. Usually, when I'm having problems, it gets really slow, and then I get the "Oops... an error occurred" message.
  • Nope.

    I just tried sharing about 40 items and get an error message every time. I'm even getting an error message just by scrolling through my feed list.
  • Not having any issues w/ mine Robert...are you still overseas?
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