Google Reader relaunched a few weeks ago, and for the first time since my initial foray into blogging with Radio Userland in 2003, I’m actually enjoying using an RSS reader.
Why? River of news. Most feed readers inexplicably model the email workflow, presenting feeds like folders and feed items like messages. Given the state of most peoples’ inboxes, why on earth would you model email when you’re writing one of these things?
Google Reader does river of news right. Simply click on “All items” and scroll through the items with the mouse wheel, clicking on the interesting stories (or reading them inline when the feed is full text). Google Reader takes care of marking the items read as they scroll past. Automatically.
The praise doesn’t stop there. There are handy keyboard shortcuts (“n” for next item, “r” to refresh, etc.). Performance is excellent, as feed items are loaded on demand using AJAXy techniques. The look and feel is clean and simple, reminiscent of Gmail, down to easy to read timestamps like “9:53 AM (7 minutes ago)”; and, also like Gmail, there’s a mobile version.
Intriguingly, you can sort by “auto” in addition to by newest, which presumably applies some sort of relevance algorithm to the feed items. However, it isn’t clear how it determines relevance (does it track my clicks as I scroll through the feeds, examine my broader search history, what?).
Google Reader is a good platform citizen too. There’s a gadget you can add to your personalized Google home page, and gadgets, in case you missed it, are becoming full fledged web components as of last week. Oh, there’s an API too.
Finally, in concert with Mozilla Firefox 2, subscribing to feeds finally no longer involves configuring a bookmarklet or, worse, the complex gymnastics of right click/copy link location/go to the appropriate URL/paste/subscribe. With Firefox 2, you can configure the feed subscriber to use Google Reader. As a result, you can now click on the feed icon in the address bar to subscribe to the site’s feed. In most cases, you can even click on a link to an RSS/Atom feed, for those sites that don’t have autodiscovery configured properly. My only complaint here is that it doesn’t remember that I want to subscribe in Google Reader; rather, it asks whether I want to “Add to Google Homepage” or “Add to Google Reader” every time. Ideally, it would show me a preview of the feed instead. I’ve seen Google Reader do that before, so perhaps it’s just a matter of configuring it to go to a different URL, though I’m not sure how to do that.
So, what’s not to like here? As with most Google products, it’s not particularly well integrated with the Google platform. Indeed, in that particular post, I complained that there were three different ways of creating a bookmark in the Google platform. Well, there now appear to be four. If all of these mechanisms were integrated, that would be enormously powerful. See something interesting in the Google Reader? Click on the star and, optionally, add tags. See something interesting on the search results page? Ditto. See something interesting on a random webpage? Pull down a menu on the Google Toolbar and do the same thing that way. Want to add free form notes to any of the above bookmarks? Pop into Google Notebook. Naturally, all of these actions should result in the bookmarks/tags/notes/etc. being added to a single stream that can be shared with other users, with all of the resulting social network functionality. Etc. etc. etc.
Sigh. I guess I have to be patient a little bit longer. Fortunately, Google sees the problem and is finally doing something about it.
Did Google pay you for it? I would never give up my privacy to a third party. Use Vienna RSS instead, and you can also read the news while offline.
Oh, wait, Vienna only works on OSX, and Debian is still decades behind OSX…
I could improve my privacy by unplugging my computer from the network, but that would greatly limit its usefulness. As with everything security and privacy related, this is a tradeoff. I’m willing to let Google know what sites I’m visiting in exchange for the greater productivity their tools give me. If you’re not, that’s fine too. Everyone’s going to come down slightly differently on whether the tradeoff is worthwhile. -ian
P.S. – Agree completely on the offline thing. I consider that a big hole in the Google platform, as you’ve probably gathered if you’re read my earlier postings. -ian
>I’m willing to let Google know what sites I’m visiting in exchange for the greater productivity their tools give me.
Ian, the unqualified “greater” means that Google’s RSS is greater than any other RSS reader. Now, if you try Vienna, for example, you’ll see that in addition to keeping Google’s eyes away from your privacy, and allowing you to save and read the articles offline on a well organized library, it also has custom css styles to purge the articles from advertisements and to format them with your choice of font and page outline. I’ve designed my custom css, and it is a pleasure for the eyes, clean and unclattered. So, I’ve specific reasons to say that Vienna is better than Google’s RSS, and, as far as I could see, to any other RSS reader to date.
>I’m willing to let Google know what sites I’m visiting
I am not.
>If you’re not, that’s fine too.
I value privacy a lot. It is a human right. Do not give up your basic rights, our fathers have died to give them to us.
You talk as if I’m carelessly throwing my privacy out the window. If you use Google (or any other search engine), you’re already being tracked unless you go to extreme measures. See, e.g., the recent AOL debacle. Personally, I don’t find the idea of having my clicks tracked pernicicious enough to bend myself into a pretzel to get away from it. If anything, I find the technological implications intriguing. What I do online implicity says what’s relevant to me, all without me having to do anything. If Google can use that data to build results that are more relevant to me, that’s all right by me. I worry more about being locked in—what if someone else comes up with a better tool, and I want to change providers? Do I have to start all over in recording my clicks etc.? (For more, see http://www.attentiontrust.org/.) -ian
I agree that the new Reader is fantastic – it took about five minutes for me to decide to switch from Bloglines after trying it, which is about as long as it took to decide *not* to switch when I tried the *old* Reader. Every complaint I ever had about Bloglines is gone in Reader.
Couple of comments though:
“Sort by auto” is explained in their FAQ, it puts feeds with fewer items to the top so that feeds with infrequent postings don’t get lost in the noise. I’d have to try this in practice to see whether I like it.
But neither of the available options is what I actually want: when using software which already tracks what I’ve seen before, why on earth would I want to read stuff in *backwards* order? The “most recent first” organization of blogs is solely in response to the fact that when visiting a blog you don’t know where the reader has read up to yet. It’s a completely inexplicable omission considering how trivial it is to reverse a sort order.
Other concerns I have with Reader also largely come down to the fact that it exposes less options than Bloglines did. Even though I accepted the defaults for several of these, the existence of the option was a valuable indicator that the actual behavior was what I wanted. For example Bloglines let me tell it whether to treat updated items as new or not, so I knew that it *was* treating them as new. With Reader, I have no idea if it does or not.
Oh and in response to Bob: aggregators running on your local machine are entirely useless if you:
– Like to read your feeds from more than one location or on more than one computer, eg work and home
– Ever want to be able to turn your computer off (unless you just don’t care about missing posts)
– Ever lose network connectivity (yes, I’m sure Google sometimes loses connectivity, but a LOT less frequently than I do and for much shorter periods)
– Ever find yourself using someone else’s computer or a public terminal and still want to keep up on your feeds
If any of those things are important to you, then it’s no longer a question of *if* you want to give up your privacy, but *who* you care to give it up to. If you use an ISP, the information of what sites you’re visiting is already known to at least one corporate entity (or do you browse through an anonymizing proxy network too?) And how exactly do you send or receive email without it being transmitted in plaintext through goodness knows how many corporate entities’ networks?
I trust Google as much as any corporate entity and much more than most.