24 October 06

Google Reader makes me want to rock out

I think I’ve realised one of the main reasons of my main blogging resurgence. Google Reader.

When I started blogging, I was using my laptop for work, but for the past few months, I’ve been without a feed reader at work, as I’m not able to use my Mac at work any more, due to “the system not supporting personal machines” [read: we can’t be bothered setting up your laptop for you]. All my feeds had been stored on a rather fab program called NetNewsWire, and due to the amount of feeds I subscribe to, nearly 80, reading my feeds at the end of the working day had become a chore. Too much effort to read post after post, so most often, I would click ‘mark all read’ and be done with it. I can deal with 10 posts at a time, but 80+ is far too much hard work.

In the meantime, I’d been looking for a program that would synchronize feeds by downloading/uploading details of what you’re subscribed to and what items you’ve read, and store these details online. If NetNewsWire or one of the feed reader vendors made a program like this, I’m sure they would get significantly more users. RSS power users really would enjoy the fact they could read their feeds from work. We all like distractions, why not let it be a distraction relevant to the job, rather than Puzzle Bobble, Youtube, etc.

At the time, none of the web based feed readers really had the smooth user interface that I would have liked from a desktop app. I tried Bloglines, Rojo and the original version of Google Reader, and none of them really did anything for me. Bit too clunky for my liking.

When I read about Google Reader being revamped, then I thought I would take another look. I wasn’t expecting anything much, maybe just a new skin or something. Fortunately, the new version of Google Reader is actually really good. It runs fast for an web-based Ajax application and looks rather nice – as you’d expect, it looks similar to Gmail, albeit more blue. I took the dive into web-based feed-reading last week, and haven’t looked back. I wouldn’t say Google Reader is better than NetNewsWire at all, because it’s just not, but the advantage of accessing feeds from wherever I am is such a bonus. The fact that I’m reading more throughout the day makes me more inspired to write.

Google Reader does need some improvements. Althought it’s been rumoured for some time now, it’s still in desperate need of an API, as there’s nothing much that will integrate with it at the moment, be it Firefox extensions or desktop notifiers. Google are good at opening up APIs so hopefully soon we shall see some interesting uses of it. Another thing is it can get a bit unresponsive sometimes – for example, if I’ve read a post, it doesn’t always register than I’ve just read that post, so leaves it marks as unread. To be fair, the product is still in the labs [Google’s non-Web 2.0 way of saying ‘beta’] so hopefully these minor annoyances will be ironed out soon enough.

However, if you’re like me – a hardcore RSS user who likes to read his feeds at work – I can’t recommend Google Reader enough. It’s living proof that a webapp can hold its own with more mighty desktop applications.

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