Each time Google comes out with a new toy I find I'm adopting it in place of the software or approach I used before. Gmail displaced my Yahoo! Mail account and Google Talk convinced me to switch away from the Jabber IM system I had been playing with. And ever since I've been using Google Desktop for search and Sidebar interface I haven't looked back.Now Google Reader is coaxing me to use it for news feeds instead of current new aggregator (the lovely Sage extension in Firefox). Ever since experiencing the AJAX-goodness of Gmail I've been curious to see how Google might apply that same approach in other applications. I've only been experimenting with Reader for a few days now, but so far I'm liking the UI approach taken. I do like the tag-based approach to organizing your feeds, but so far find the sort mechanism a bit clunky (just give me the most used tags along the top!). Still, it passed my critical test of correctly rendering my online comic feeds, so how can I complain?
I hope Google isn't secretly planning to become an evil empire anytime soon, 'cause I'm slowly getting hooked on nearly every application they offer...
I'm not terribly impressed with Google Reader. There's no way to quickly scan and discard all your feeds, like I can in Bloglines (or even Newsgator for that matter).
ReplyDeleteHard to disagree - although I've only accumulated an hour or so of total time with Reader, the ability to quickly sort feeds is definitely lacking. The existing ability to tag feeds could be leveraged to quickly sort feeds by tag, which I'd see as an improvement over the traditional hierarchy that most aggregators use.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see how Reader progresses - I sent feedback to the Reader team and was directed to this Google Groups site:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Reader