Talking to Bill Wallace yesterday, I learned he’s a fan of Google Reader.
For me it’s the best thing Google offers aside from their search engine. Google Reader is fantastic.
Power blogger Robert Scoble can manage over 600 RSS feeds using Google Reader. That means he keeps track of what’s new on over 600 websites.
Wow!
By comparison, I have 238 feeds and there’s no way I can come close to following them all. (Not all my RSS feeds are blogs. Some are flickr photo streams, YouTube video streams, news sites, and more.)
Google interviewed Scoble on how he does it. (Perhaps I’ll try his “river of news” skimming method.)
see the video – Google Reader: Robert Scoble
Interestingly, Scoble in June mentioned two major problems with Google Reader: Lousy SEARCH and the fact that you cannot check your feeds when offline.
Since then, Google Reader added an offline function called Google Gears. But Lousy SEARCH? Shame on Google!
If you want to try Google Reader yourself, check this video tutorial.
Rick McCharles 
Maybe I should have given it a better trial run. I switched to GoogleReader for a week or so. It was pretty easy, since I could import my BlogLines stuff and only have 25 feeds.
I was impressed by some features, but ended up going back to BlogLines, mostly because I couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted/expected it to.
I can’t even remember exactly what was wrong with it. Now I have to go back and try it again to come up with a more accurate description… 🙂 I will probably be back later.
Google Reader was such a drastic change from older feed readers that it is difficult to compare.
The biggest advantage are the key commands J, K and spacebar. The AJAX code keeps it very snappy.
I am trying out Google Gears this week to see if that has any effect, positive or negative, on speed.
Okay, I have been using it again for 2 days now. I think I will stick with it. The feature that I found took time to adapt to was the fact that it doesn’t keep my various feeds grouped together. I find that when I am skimming down the headlines, I treat them differently depending on the source. Headlines from The Onion have very different meanings from Slashdot. With Bloglines, as I scroll down through things, my brain switches into different modes.
Some things are brilliant though. I do really like the way that things are automatically marked as read as you scroll past them. Once I started using the “Refresh” button, then my annoyance at the difficulty in determining whether or not you had already read an article or not diminished.
In general, I feel that I waste a lot of time, reparsing old articles, just because some trivial changes have been made to the original. I would like a flag that I could set so that it would never re-show me things.
I would also like a filter to get rid of some of the things which there seem to be a LOT of articles on, but of which I am not interested in. CELL PHONES are such an item. They pop up on all of my technology/electronics/computer stuff all the time. The first few thousand may have been interesting but I really don’t care to see any more.