Google Reader October 9
So, I’ve been playing with Google Reader a bit, and overall, it’s another slick Google AJAX app. However, I agree with Les over at OxDECAFBAD that it doesn’t really meet the needs of people who are used to reading lots and lots of feeds:
Anyway, what I look for in a feed reader is how well it enables speed skimming: I’m going to ignore 70-90% of what I see in feeds, so I don’t want an aggregator which helps me carefully and methodically pick my way across the headlines.No, I want something which lets me scream through feeds as fast as my eyes can move and a finger can slap the space bar. I’ll queue up what I really want to read in browser tabs or some other temporary storage, but I’m not going to want to spend more than a split second on a headline.
I think the biggest thing missing is a sense of overall context. You can only view 8 headlines at a time, and by default, you see all your feedsd aggregated together. Heck, I get far more feed content than email, and I can view way more subject lines in gmail, or any other email or feed reader. The net effect is that it feels like you’re looking at your feeds through a tiny pinhole, when you really want a firehose.
I did notice something interesting about Google Reader, though. It seems to be showing me entries for feeds that I don’t subscribe to. I can’t tell whether this is a bug or a feature, but I’m voting for the latter, as they seem to be stuff I’d be interested in (weblogs.oreilly.com, for one). Maybe they’re doing cool collaborative filtering stuff? It’s not clear.