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THE best RSS reader

In case you haven’t noticed, Google Reader has undergone a bit of a rework by those crazy lads over at Google.  And let me just say, it’s superb.  Its such an improvement over the old Google reader (which you can switch back to in preferences by the way, not that you’d want to) its hard to believe its come from the same place.  One thing that really caught my eye is the video introduction which has a great description of why you should use an RSS reader, it would be a good introduction to some non tech savvy friends or relatives and goes along the lines of “When you check your email, you don’t have to go to Bob and check whethers he’s sent you mail and then go to Lisa to see if she’s sent you mail, you just check your mail and it’s all there.  So why would you go and check all these different websites everyday, why not just check Google Reader”.
And its an email, Gmail infact, style interface Google Reader provides.  If you choose the “All Items” view you just get a list, ordered by time, of all the items from all your RSS feeds.  It is just like checking your email.  For the more organised amongst us, you can tag them, order them in folders and select them by feed.  You can also go through All Items while expanded, which is just like a giant web page.  And of course the Gmail like interface is very AJAXY and smooth.  Plus, adding feeds is so easy.  Not only do they give you a bookmarklet but theres also a superb, and very accurate search box.  Fancy subscribing to the Google Blog, just type in “google blog” and it will return a list of matching RSS feeds.  And seeing as its a Google powered search, its probably going to be pretty good.  You can also just paste an RSS feed address in there as well.
There are a couple of things I’d like to see.  Firstly, something I seem to keep going on about with Google Products is that I’d like to see better integration with their other products and really leverage the advantage they have in being the market leader in some key areas.  With it being Google, I’d also like the ability to search across the items in my feeds, preferably archived items as well.  Also, at the moment things like embedded video only seem to work with certain feeds, specifically the You Tube and Google Video top ten feeds.  Also, it still seems a little buggy.  I keep getting the “An Error Occured” message and trying to mark all items as read is a bit hit and miss, as is using their refresh button (you have to reload the entire page, not a huge problem).  Overall though, since trying it out I’ve not been to Netvibes, my previous RSS reader, once.  It’s THAT good.

This post was written on Saturday, October 14th 2006 by Simon T and has been categorised under News , Technology , Web 2.0. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg Story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

2 Responses to “THE best RSS reader”

  1. nico Says:

    October 15th, 2006 at 12:27 pm

    same thing regarding netvibes : was my previous RSS reader and now switched to GReader cause you can organize your feeds better. I’m surprised how fast I dropped netvibes and I have a question for you : what else did you use netvibes for ? Mail and other gadgets don’t seem so killer a feature to me

  2. Si Says:

    October 15th, 2006 at 5:20 pm

    Actually, I didn’t really trust netvibes with any login data for email so I never used it. I did use the box.net gadget but I could very easily live without it as it can easily be mounted as a local drive anyway. I think netvibes concentrated too much on the bells and whistles rather than getting the key functionality right first.

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