I think you know already that Google Reader has left the labs. Great news, but for a week or so I cannot “read the Reader” with my browser of choice – Opera. But seems to be that Google doesn’t like it as I do.

So, the story is that now, after putting Reader out of beta stage, Google teach it speak few new languages  And shows it in browser with a language that match user’s regional settings. Cool? No. For me, since my regional settings are set to country where I’m living now, this means that Google Reader speaks to me in German. But I don’t know German language! Weird… I was so sad…

And is was more sadly that Google don’t provide at least a hint for users on how to change this preference. After googling around, I’ve seen that this is not only my problem, but also many other users have the same problem.

And just in the evening I remembered about similar weird problem experienced with Google’s blogging platform – BlogSpot. When I’ve decided to open a blog, BlogSpot showed to me it’s German face. Yes, it was smart enough to see that I’m coming from German speaking country and polite enough to show his face in German. Did I mention that I don’t know German?

Yes, there is a solution to make it speak English. But it requires googling, reading few blog posts and trying. For me, and I think not only for me, it was simpler to create a blog in other place, that by default speaks the language most widely used in Internet.

Well. Sorry for ranting so long about it.

Go for it: http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en. Google Reader in English. Still good. Still best RSS reader. And well shown in Opera.

 Update: after writing this post, found this on Google Reader discussion group: Changing the language settings. This is the case when I’m glad that posted information became obsolete so fast.