Google Reader has rolled out a few small but nice updates over the past few days.

Now if you click ‘Mark all as read’ when you have a large number of items unread, Reader will bring up a prompt to ask if you’re sure you want to mark them all as read. Quite a few times I’ve accidentally hit this button and wiped out all my unread items having to go back to the “all items” view and no remembering what I hadn’t read yet, so this is a nice little update.

Also new as Google Operating System points out is that hovering over a individual item’s time now shows you both when you received the item in your Reader and when it was actually published. As The Last Podcast notes, this can be very useful information for some less frequently updated sites which Google doesn’t crawl as often as the regularly updated ones and so it may often look like they are coming very late to a story.

Some nice small tweaks for Google Reader, oh yeah, and they updated the favicon too (which like many people I wouldn’t have noticed except for the fact that FriendFeed pulls in favicons).