Ho John Lee’s Weblog

My quick notes on trying out Google Reader:

Summary:

• The AJAX user interface is whizzy and fun, and is similar to an e-mail reader.
• Importing feeds is really slow.
• Keyboard navigation shortcuts are great.
• Searching through your own feeds or for new feeds is convenient using Google
• I hate having a single item displayed at a time.
• “Blog This” action is handy, if you use Blogger. They could easily make this go to other blogging services later.
• This could be a good “starter” service for introducing someone to feed readers, but
• No apparent subscription export mechanism
• Doesn’t deal well with organizing a large number of feeds.

More notes:
I started importing the OPML subscription file from Bloglines into Google Reader on Friday evening. I have around 500 subscriptions in that list, and I’m not sure how long it ended up taking to import. It was more than 15 minutes, which was when I headed off to bed, and completed sometime before this afternoon.

I love having keyboard navigation shortcuts. The AJAX-based user interface is zippy and “fun”. Unfortunately, Google Reader displays articles one at a time, a little like reading e-mail. I’m in the habit of scanning sections of the subscription lists to see which sections I want to look at, then scanning and scrolling through lists of articles in Bloglines. Even though this requires mousing and clicking, it’s a lot faster than flashing one article at a time in Google Reader.

I don’t think the current feed organization system works on Google Reader, at least for me. My current (bad) feed groupings from Bloglines show up on Google Reader as “Labels” for groups of feeds, which is nice. It’s hard to just read a set of feeds, though. Postings show up in chronological order, or by relevance. This is totally unusable for a large set of feeds, especially when several of them are high-traffic, low-priority (e.g. Metafilter, del.icio.us, USGS earthquakes). If I could get the “relevance” tuned by context (based on label or tag?) it might be useful.

When you add a new feed, it starts out empty, and appears to add articles only as they are posted. It would be nice to have them start out with whatever Google has cached already. I’m sure I’m not the first subscriber to most of the feeds on my list.

On the positive side, this seems like a good starting point for someone who’s new to feed readers and wants a web-based solution. It looks nice, people have heard of Google, and the default behaviors probably play better with a modest number of feeds. Up to this point, I’ve been steering people at Bloglines in the past, and more recently pointing them at Rojo.

I wish the Bloglines user interface could be revised to make it quicker to get around. I really like keyboard navigation. I can also see some potential in the Google Reader’s listing by “relevance” rather than date listing, and improved search and blogging integration. I’m frequently popping up another window to run searches while reading in Bloglines.

Google Reader doesn’t seem like it’s quite what I’m looking for just now, but I’ll keep an eye on it.

Wishful thinking:
I think I want something to manage even more feeds than I have now, but where I’m reading a few regularly, a few articles from a pool of feeds based on “relevance”, and articles from the “neighborhood” of my feeds when they hit some “relevance” criteria. I’d also like to search my pool of identified / tagged feeds, along with some “neighborhood” of feeds and other links. I think a lot of this is about establishing context, intent, and some sort of “authoritativeness”, to augment the usual search keyword matching.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Blogging, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.