Google reader

By Nic Price on 8 October 2005 — 1 min read

I’ve been trying out the newly launched Google reader, which I was alerted to via my Bloglines subscription to a Google blog – oh my aren’t we just sooo post-modern 😉

You need a Google account (gmail address) to use it.

Like gmail it makes extensive use of ajax for screen-based rather than page-based interactions.

On the plus side it’s as jargon free as you can get with something like this. A healthy thing that should take the feed reader beyond the realm of the somehwat geeky.

You have “subscriptions” and a “reading list.”

The user interface lets you focus on articles and behaves like the “Preview Pane” in Outlook so you can move up and down the list of titles and the content will appear in a larger area of the screen to the right.

But in doing so it strips the content of any of its original personality and makes everything look the same.

You can label your subscriptions so you can find them later, in the same way you can label emails in gmail.

It mixes keyboard shortcuts with mouse clicks – I still haven’t figured out how you’d add a Star to an article without a mouse.

But I don’t get a sense of community from it and I can’t see how I’d share stuff other than being able to blog it (if I was using blogger) or email it (if I was using gmail). It doesn’t feel like a two-way thing.

I’m sticking with Bloglines for the time being.

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  • You can star by pressing ‘s’. (Or at least that’s what *should* work.) And all the stuff you’ve just mentioned will all be upcoming features – 1) blogging from properties other than Blogger, 2) Emailing from properties other than Gmail, 3) Relaxing the html stripping in posts.

    Thank you for the feedback, it’s just an infant right now and I’m hoping to make it grow up pretty fast.

  • Chris, thanks for the info.

    The ‘s’ key is now starring entries, not sure why it wasn’t before.

    And that’s good to know about the other points.

    I’ll watch with interest.

    🙂

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