Could Google Reader team have done a better PR job?

Oh give them a break

It’s christmas.

They listened, admitted their mistakes, fixed them and all this is a period where they should have been spending time with their families instead of behind their pc’s coding up the changes.

To me that shows dedication and passion for their product. Yes they made mistakes but ho ho ho it’s christmas time, maybe we should hold this uber-hip micro-critic for a week or two…

ok sir. you will get this post on techmeme in no time

man, you have all the answers, all the time …

must be pretty hard to live seeing how everybody do everything wrong …

Those tips seem to apply to a new product launch, not the addition of a relatively minor feature in an already existing product.

Can you imagine if Google, Apple or any company felt they needed to demo at a conference or have a full PR event with bloggers just to introduce a new button in the preferences? I fail to see where the uproar is. It’s not like folks were sharing their social security numbers.

I for one hope your example isn’t the lesson Google takes away from this. If anything, launching a new feature to all users and then getting and responding to feedback as Google has done is a much better idea than making their decisions based on conversations with the “in” crowd.

I agree with Judi. Google can’t spend time giving a demo for every tweak they make to their products. Instead of worrying about PR, Google should expand the Share feature in Reader. For example, I would love to see a count of how many readers have shared an item. This would make Reader like Digg by letting me focus on popular content and add my “vote” by sharing the item myself. I think we all have RSS feed overload, and this would be one way to help cut through the cloud of information.

Many technological developments, even minor ones, could be helped by some advance discussion outside of the groupthink that can sometimes occur within large organizations, so I think Robert’s and Alex’s tips are useful. So long as that type of conversation doesn’t supplant user discussions and studies, I think it’s a nice addition to a producer’s palette.

(This is slightly odd to post, however… Robert I tried before release to get a hold of you, among quite a few others – did you check your gmail address? Timing might simply have been bad for all, I had very few people I was able to actually reach this or last month.)

The amount of people who use said app (or care one iota) has to be measured in the electron-microscopic. Going product launch heavy for a minor feature concerning a small-user-base niche product, still in eternal beta development (over the holidays no less), is hardly a proportional response.

But then Google has never been good at PR ever, hunkering down into a near robotic cult, but like Apple, it hasn’t seemed to hurt them one bit. But Google is not so much a company, as it is a religion. But like everything Google, use freebie app, it comes bundled it’s own form of spyware, also true for anything in the “social software” space.

But your ole buddy Vic is busy playing Googleish mobile-app tiddlywinks, and . Such a “noble cause”, he’s on, doubt he has time to feed worms to all the crybaby bloggers.

Ack…”help[ing] all of mankind”. The WordPress a hef blew up, but glad the Web is here to save us from ourselves.

Been a long time Rob.

It’s a bit ironic that you are abandoning a failed startup yet you’re giving business tips to GOOG?

Can you give an example of a business you helped start that’s been successful? What have you actually accomplished?

If I’m AAPL, GOOG, or Facebook why the heck do I need you at my press events? All you do is whine and complain like an ADD kid. Instead of trying to accommodate you, I think it’s time they gave you your Ritalin and sent you on your way.

Too bad – your blog was enjoying a renaissance of open-mindedness that last year or so. Pity that we’re returning to the style you employed during your Microsoft days.

That’s pretty ridiculous. If they have to do all of this every time they roll a new feature, the number of new features they introduce and the frequency with which they introduce them will decline dramatically.

People were just silly about this. Give it a break. They did their job and fixed the problem.

Compare the negative publicity on this to that of a complete failure of an operating system like Vista and it seems to me a way disproportionate response from the blogosphere. Which is par for the course really. Call it the unwisdom of crowds.

“It’s a bit ironic that you are abandoning a failed startup yet you’re giving business tips to GOOG?”

Haha. I laughed.

“It’s a bit ironic that you are abandoning a failed startup yet you’re giving business tips to GOOG?”

Haha. I laughed.

It seems to me that their first response was pretty lame. Had they done their 2nd release as the 1st it might have played-out completely different. Seems like most of what people were asking for was already there– and taking a little more time to explain that would have helped immensely.

I find it interesting that you have asking the users whether they want the feature and getting feedback the 4th strike. If they did that first, they would have had all the answers they needed. A simple survey on the user’s dashboard/home of Reader “do you want your GTalk contacts to see your Shared items automatically?” would have given them more than enough information so they could make an informed decision as to whether to proceed.

I don’t use shared items at all but Google’s blunder shows how out of touch they are with HOW people use their products.

Not trying to knock opinions but unless Google gets to the root of the problem, understand their mistake and why it was made, then resolve it (that’s not “Oops, we made a mistake and we fixed it!”) they’ll do it again in another form.

I find it interesting that you have asking the users whether they want the feature and getting feedback the 4th strike. If they did that first, they would have had all the answers they needed. A simple survey on the user’s dashboard/home of Reader “do you want your GTalk contacts to see your Shared items automatically?” would have given them more than enough information so they could make an informed decision as to whether to proceed.

I don’t use shared items at all but Google’s blunder shows how out of touch they are with HOW people use their products.

Not trying to knock opinions but unless Google gets to the root of the problem, understand their mistake and why it was made, then resolve it (that’s not “Oops, we made a mistake and we fixed it!”) they’ll do it again in another form.

They knew exactly what they were doing. They floated this during Christmas — to test how well no-opt-in social features would be accepted by hardcore users — with plenty of time to react before most users returned from holiday. This wasn’t driven by PR, clearly, but I’d bet money it was driven by Marketing.

Robert, you jumped on the new features immediately and began promoting them vigorously. I don’t recall you raising any privacy issues. You were annoyed at seeing duplicate items from your friends. Would you have been more critical if Google PR had paid a state visit to the Court of Scoble?

You are such a self-promoting tard. Let’s review:

http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/18/googles-new-reader-features/

Wherein you wrote:

“8:I don’t think it’s a privacy problem because it’s pretty clear to me that when you share something it goes into public view, but some of my friends REALLY disagree. So, that tells me you have, at minimum, a perception/expectation problem and probably have some rethinking to do as you add new features that take advantage of the public shared items capabilities”

So YOU in your infinite wisdom of all things social, did NOT think it a privacy problem. You were GUSHING over these new features from a social networking aspect.

NOW, because people apparently smarter than you seem to be pointing out the flaws you are going back on your position and flogging Google or their missteps? Where was this criticism in your original review?

Sounds like someone is throwing a tantrum because Google doesn’t consider him relevant enough to give him a briefing.

My, aren’t we all grumpy after Christmas?

Don’t the people criticising Robert here seriously wonder that Google don’t seem to have a team of seasoned beta-testers to check over seemingly innocuous-looking updates before releasing them to us, the great unwashed?

Of course Google can’t be expected to stick to the HowTo-Launch list for a brand new product all the time.
But they ought to be thinking of each of those points before changing even a button.

All I can say is I was feeling kinda snubbed that Larry and Serguei didn’t send me anything for Hanukah, but over the past week, I realized they were either confused about my religion and sending me a Christmas present or were just belated on the Hanukah front. Either way, I could not have asked for a better gift than for Google Reader to launch in this manner and take virtually all the focus off of Beacon’s initial rollout issues (except for the comparisons). Anyway, thanks Google.
- Fake Mark Zuckerberg
http://www.fakezuck.com

++1 to comment #10

anyway – it’s a free product. why should people whine, not exactly as if anyone forced them to use it or to pay top $$$ for it. if Google implements features that support their business model then that’s their decision.

Derrick: you missed the point. Within MINUTES of my first post people were complaining about this feature. If Google had shown this product to 40 bloggers they would have gotten the feedback.

Jamie: >If they have to do all of this every time they roll a new feature, the number of new features they introduce and the frequency with which they introduce them will decline dramatically.

I’ve done more than 200 demos. NONE have taken more than an hour to film. Some, like the one with Zoho, have been watched more than 100,000 times.

So, are you really serious when you tell businesses not to take an hour to show off their product in video to such a large audience?

How many hours did this feature take to code and test? Hundreds, at minimum. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it took thousands.

And they can’t add on another hour for an interview and demo video? Give me a freaking break.

>It’s a bit ironic that you are abandoning a failed startup yet you’re giving business tips to GOOG?

Interesting, that “failed” startup, as you put it, had millions in revenues this year alone and my show alone had about a million viewers a month.

Hey, Google can ignore my advice if it wants. I’m not the one who bought YouTube and then doesn’t use video to communicate with its customers.