Google added a little but welcomed feature to its Reader service: favicons. These are the small square icons supplied by sites that show up both in your address bar and open tabs (in most browsers at least). Google Reader users can now choose to see them in their feed source list, where formerly, feeds just showed up as little blue RSS signal brands.
According to Google it was actually the top requested feature from Google Reader's product ideas mini-site. In some ways favicons are a logical step in streamlining the feed reading process, since you can now find a selected feed in an extensive list of sites without even looking at the names. This is particularly critical since Reader displays feeds out of alphabetical order.
Some might find it to be sensory overload; conveniently there is a fast toggle to turn them off and on right forms the subscriptions list. Google's choices to where to put the favicons is a little uncommon. For the moment, they exist only in the source subscriptions page and not on the article pages where the majority of the reading is done. This is most obvious when cruising down a listing of mixed items from assorted sites where users will still need to depend on the site names to spot where the content is coming from.
