I was just skimming through my feeds when I noticed that a YouTube player popped up in Google Reader. That, as far as I know, didn’t happen yesterday, and so it appears to be a new feature:
As far as I know, Google is the first company to add this to their feedreader, and it certainly makes a useful feature. Google Reader really is innovating in a way which we are not seeing with the other feed readers (such as with their ‘trends’ feature), and whilst the display of embeds is hardly revolutionary, it is overcoming a major usability barrier to the widespread adoption of RSS feed reading. It is also a step towards integration of YouTube with existing Google products (it may be that Google has added the ability to view other embeds as well, however; I haven’t checked).
It is somewhat ironic that Peter instructs in the post pictured above to ‘click through for a YouTube embed’. I’m pleased that that is no longer necessary!
Wow. Awesome feature. I like that Google already put a little Flash MP3 player in Greader for enclosures, but this makes enjoying content without clicking through even easier!
I’ll leave the click through message on that post (and future posts too), because as you mentioned this only appears to be a Greader feature at the moment and not standard across feed readers (would be nice though).
I actually haven’t been using Google Reader, until recently, it’s actually really useful (even though I don’t yet have many feed’s). So to me it doesn’t really seem very different, but, it looks like a very good addition, and I’ve already used it a whole single time!
“it may be that Google has added the ability to view other embeds as well, however; I haven’t checked”
It does:
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/01/getting-embedded-in-google-reader.html
__Vali