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Secret feature of Google Reader

Secret feature of Google Reader - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Hi everybody this is Matt Cutts and I’m gonna show you another hidden gem of Google. This one really is a hidden gem because it’s an Easter egg that’s buried in Google Reader that you probably don’t know about. So, Google Reader just recently introduced something called a Like Button, which is well known from lots of different services, including FriendFeed, probably Facebook, a bunch of different places. So, whenever you’re looking at something. For example, I’m looking at this cool blog post about someone makes a sandwich and then puts the sandwich on the plate before they take it out of the cabinet. So, that sometimes, they just open up the door and there’s your sandwich, ready to go. I think that’s cool. So, I could click on like, and you can see, liking is public and you say, okay. And I can also click unlike and depending on, you know, the little guy, he lights up, all that sort of stuff. That’s pretty cute. But there’s a secret mode in Google Reader that you probably haven’t heard of. You can use something known as the Konami Code, which is from like Contra, you know, you could do this sort of, you know, code and you’d get 30 extra lives. So, the code is, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and what happens, if you do that in Google Reader, these ninjas appear on the left hand Sidebar. That’s pretty cool by itself, but in the same way that you’d get 30 lives, anything that will show up on your subscriptions appears to have 30 unread things. So, that’s the secret ninja mode of Google Reader. So, that’s a pretty neat Easter egg. But what’s even more neat is, you’ll notice that the Like buttons turns into a heart. And if you click the heart, “Goosh,” like 20 hearts burst out of it and then disappear. And then you click unlike, and a little broken heart will appear and it will disappear like that. So, it’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of addictive to just kind of click like and click unlike and you can just watch all the hearts appear and disappear. So, it is not, you know, anything like a problem if you just want to click like and unlike, 30 or 40 times. It’s really pretty addictive. So, in case you didn’t know about the ninja mode of Google Reader, now you do. And you know, that the like button will “Goosh,” unleash a lot of hearts on the world. Hope you enjoy that hidden Gem.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: