Chris Dadswell

In this article I plan to give my take I how I believe Google Listen interacts with Google Reader. The article assumes you use Google Reader and Google Listen.

If anyone knows any different to what is produced here please feel free to comment below.

What is Google Listen ?

Taken from the Google Listen Labs;

Listen from Google Labs brings podcasts and web audio to your Android-powered device. It lets you search, subscribe, download and stream. By subscribing to programs it will create a personalized audio-magazine loaded with fresh shows and news stories whenever you listen.

To take this a bit further I will describe how Listen can be used.

• When you first start Listen it gives a brief demo of its use
• Listen will then present you with a dialog displaying your GMail account
  • This is the account it will use to sync with Google Reader
• You are then presented with the main dashboard
  • My Listen Items – Displays your Queued Items and Refresh Items
    • Queued Items – This is a queued list of podcasts that are to be listened to or are currently being listened too. This list can be rearranged by long pressing a podcast and moving it to the top of the list or the bottom.
    • Refresh Items – This is list of podcasts that have become available since the last sync with your Google Reader Listen Subscriptions (more on this later). You can choose to add these to your Queued Items or not. Once the podcast(s) are added to the Queued Items (by long pressing the podcast and ‘Add to queue’) they will begin to download.
      • NOTE: Downloading podcasts, you can choose when this happens and over which data carrier (i.e., 3G or WiFi). You can change these options within the Settings for Google Listen from the Dashboard.
  • My subscriptions – This lists all the podcast subscriptions that have been added to Listen. For example, if you subscribe to Radio 4′s – ‘History of the world in 100 objects’ it will appear in this list. It will also show how many podcasts episodes are available for this subscription.
    • Clicking on a subscription gives you further options.
      • Subscribe/Unsubscribe – Subscribe to the podcast feed or unsubscribe
      • Queue… – Choose how many podcasts you want to queue at any one time
      • Mark All… – Choose to mark all podcasts in a subscription as listened to, or not listened (if you want to listen to previously listened podcasts again.
        • NOTE: These appear to be cached indefinitely based on how many episodes you choose to store in the Storage Settings section of Listen’s settings.
  • Popular searches – What other podcast content people are searching for.
  • Recently played – Podcasts that you have recently listened too.

What is Google Reader ?

Taken from Google Reader help;

Google Reader is a tool for gathering, reading, and sharing all the interesting blogs and websites you read on the web.

More on Google Reader can be found on the help pages.

How do Google Listen and Google Reader interact?

Version 1.1 of Google Listen brought synchronization with Google Reader. On first sync with Google Reader, Listen creates a “Listen Subscriptions” folder in Google Reader. When you find a podcast feed (essentially an audio RSS feed) on the internet you can subscribe to it and put it into the “Listen Subscriptions” folder.

What this essentially gives you is the ability to subscribe to podcasts within Google Reader. Then Google Listen synchronizes the subscriptions at given times of the day that you can configure within Google Listen.

Once Google Listen synchronizes with Google Reader any subscriptions you have added to the “Listen Subscriptions” folder will appear in the “My Subscriptions” area of Google Listen. You can then view available podcasts by going to ”My Listen Items”.

Within “My Listen Items”, clicking the “green circular arrow” next to “Refresh Items” will retrieve any available podcast episodes from all your available podcast subscriptions. You can then choose to add the podcast episodes to the “Queued Items” for caching (downloading to local storage) and for later listening.

Personal Experience

My experience of using Google Listen with Google Reader has been a fairly good one. It has had a lot of bad press on the Listen groups, but I believe it has been well developed. But could be improved, and I’m sure Google engineers are working to do just that.

I think for people that have never used Google Reader it has the potential to be a bit baffling. But on the other hand introduces them to the sublime web application that is Google Reader.

I also think more documentation on how this interaction works would help users and not just frustrate them.

I hope this article has been of interest to you and helped to give you a better understanding of these two superb applications.