SilverStripe

Why I switched to Google Reader

Posted by Sam on 26 October 2005

A brief review of Google's new RSS agregator.

So Google comes out with an RSS agregator and of course I give it a go.  Google really is the new Microsoft, except without the bitter aftertaste.  Maybe corporate america isn't all bad.   Maybe I just have a double standard ;-)

I've been using it for about a week now, not exactly a huge amount of research.  However, today I crossed a significant milestone:  I've delete my Bloglines bookmark and adopted Google Reader as my agregator of choice.  Why is this?

• Keyboard control rocks.  ROCKS.  It's really good.  An agregator is exactly the kind of application that you become "expert" at using, since you use it regularly and there's not much to it.  Efficient interaction mechanisms like keyboard control just make it that much more fun.  It's such a simple feature that I'm almost embarrased to be excited by it, but I am.  (note to self: add keyboard control to SilverStripe).
• Marking pages with a single keystroke is great; much better than similar features in Bloglines (which I never really used because of their clumsiness)
• Bloglines has an annoying feature where it marks all of the posts in a category as read as soon as you click them.  Reader marks off your pages 1 at a time.
• As one who is a wee bit sick of the hype surrounding Ajax, I'm almost embarrased to list this on my features.  However, Google has once again made use of Ajax to build an interface that would be infeasible without it.  In particular, the post-by-post view, my previous point, would be too slow under the traditional page-by-page model.

What I really like about it is that it's not "just another reader", at least when held up against my limited experience (I've only ever used Bloglines & Thunderbird for an extended period of time).  Some people have complained that it's an example of Google making a "me too" application, but I disagree. It's post-by-post, combined view is well suited to the i've-got-an-hour-to-kill mode of blog reading that I've become accustomed to.  I'd be surprised if this was the first product that worked like this, but it's probably the first web-based one, which was the reason I signed up to Bloglines in the first place.

0 Comments. Add Yours Tags: rss