Lamenting over the death of Google Reader was a favorite past time for me – but I have moved on to discovering great alternatives that can deliver great services without the additional cost. Luckily, the makers of Reeder are making their iPad and Mac app available for free.

You’ll still have to pay $2.99 for the iPhone app, but the iPad version would have cost $4.99 prior to today. Reeder’s announcement suggested that the app will only be free until its next update:

Reeder for Mac and iPad will be updated to 2.0 in the coming months. Version 2.0 will add all the features of the iPhone version, including all sharing and syncing services. Until then, Reeder for Mac and Reeder for iPad will be free, starting today.

Google has redesigned the compose and reply experience in Gmail making the overall experience a little bit faster and more sophisticated. To begin with, the compose redesign allows you to create an email in a box in the corner of your inbox and still see the messages that are coming in. The writing pane grows as your message grows and you can increase the size of your window if you want.

The recipients field has gotten more sophisticated. As before you can begin to type a name and email addresses from your contact list will begin to appear. Now you can drag and drop email addresses between the to, cc and bcc lines. You can also hover over the recipient’s email to see details about them, as well as double-click on them to edit their address. Read more

Google is accepting applications for beta testers for Google Shopping Express – a new same day delivery from merchants like Office Depot, Target, and Blue Bottle. Lucky shoppers selected for the pilot program will get free same day delivery for six months.

Today we’re starting a new experiment, Google Shopping Express. It’s a local delivery service that we hope will make it possible for you to get the items you order online the same day, and at a low cost. It’s incredibly early days and so the service is only available to a small number of people in the Bay Area.

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The team at Visual.ly have created a new tool that can create a Google Analytics infographic, helping you visualize your online traffic patterns.

Social Times has all the details:

Unlike most of the infographics on Visual.ly, these are meant to be used internally. The results are sent in a private email that webmasters can then forward to the other people in their company … After users log in with an authorized Google Analytics account, the tool will automatically tally the site’s weekly growth compared to previous weeks. This includes the change in the number of page views, the number of new and returning visitors, how much traffic was directed through social media and organic search results, how much time people spent on the site per visit and how many pages they viewed, and the bounce rate (the number of people who clicked away after seeing one page.)

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Google’s latest Chrome Experiment makes internet browsing a never ending maze game. The experiment transforms your favorite desktop website into a 3D maze that you can play with your smartphone, and it’s spectacularly addicting. To begin, just go to Chrome.com/maze and sync your phone to explore your 3D web.

If you really enjoyed World Wide Maze – check out some of Google’s other Chrome optimized experiments like Disney’s Find Your Way to Oz or Cirque Du Soleil. Read more

Watch out Evernote, Google has introduced a new Android app for taking notes called Keep. The app lets you take jot down thoughts, create lists and even add photos to help you organize your notes.

Don’t feel like writing? You can dictate notes with your voice and the app will automatically transcribe them. The app also has a feature to help you organize various topics. Essentially you can color code your notes to help organize. This could be a great way to use the app to take notes for multiple feature stories that you are working on, or perhaps different chapters in a novel. There is also an archive tool, so that you can save older projects out of the way.

The  app first appeared in Google Play earlier this week, but within a couple of hours it had disappeared. Let’s hope this time it is ready to stay for good.

Google+’s Hangouts feature has become a popular way for multiple people to hang out virtually and Google has a new tool to help you remember the fun.

The company said that it will introduce a new app called Capture to help you save your favorite moments of a Google+ hangout. The app lets you snap photos of your virtual social session.

According to Jeremy Ng, who wrote about the new app on the Google blog, the tool is better than just taking screen shots. Here is an outline of some of the app’s features:

- All photos are saved to a shared album, visible only to other Hangout invitees
- You can view these photos while inside the Hangout, when browsing your photo albums, or by visiting the original Hangout post
- And, importantly, you’ll always know when the app is in use: when you join a Hangout, when someone opens the app, and whenever a picture is taken

Google’s explorers have added some of the world’s coldest peaks to its virtual street views. The mapmakers at Google just added “Aconcagua (South America), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Mount Elbrus (Europe) and Everest Base Camp (Asia)” to its virtual tour.

The climbing teams spent 18 months documenting 3D views from the top of the world. Due to the extreme circumstances, these photos were just taken with a lightweight tripod and fisheye camera instead of the typical 40 pounds Google Trekker Backpack used for trips to the Grand Canyon and Lucas Oil Stadium. The team did not limit their photos to the mountains – images of nearby monasteries and bazars were also collected. Read more

Niantic Labs, the startup that lives inside of Google and has produced projects like the Google Field Trip app, has plans to launch a line of eBooks based on the augmented reality game Ingress.

According to a report in Publishers Lunch, the series, which is slated to launch next month, will be authored and co-published by Thomas Greanias and his @tlantis Books. The first title in the series will be called The Alignment.

Ingress is an augmented reality game that Google launched this past November and it is currently in the invite-only beta stage. Ingress’s website boasts,”the world around you is not what it seems,” and Nianticproject.com is full of cryptic messages and codes.

Google may have killed its RSS feed reader, but the company may have a new note-taking app in the works. It’s called Google Keep, but it may not be ready for public consumption just yet.

According to a report on Android Police, the app hit Google Play this morning and then disappeared a couple of hours later. Here is more from the blog: “Google Keep works a lot like Google Notebook used to: There’s a list of notes, and you can color-code them, save pictures, and make checklists. You can archive notes, which will send them to a section at the bottom of your list.”

This is kind of annoying that they put it out there and then took it away so quickly. Lets hope no reporters and writers reading this blog post downloaded and used the app only to have their notes disappear. That seems pretty unlikely since it wasn’t live for too long, and it probably wouldn’t just disappear from your device just because it is gone from the store.