Google Reader is a web-based feed reader that’s supposed to make it easy to find and subscribe to online feeds. With the Reader, users are supposed to be able to organize and stay current with the ever-increasing amount of web information they consume every day.
Reader Reviewer’s Guide (PDF – 1.3MB)
I think it’s far too early to have a decent review, because the beta is too fresh. But I’ll give it my first impression and tell you what I encountered. Adding feeds is easy, but if I add mine it says all of my entries are posted on October 7th. I have no entries for that day. Small bug.
The other feeds I entered looked fine.
Then I wanted to search through the added feeds for some topics, but that doesn’t seem to be possible yet. I also noticed something I know from Gmail, which is the ability to label things, but that seems I bit unneeded. I’m not going to use that, although possibly somebody else will think it’s brilliant. I haven’t got time to label everything I read.
I don’t use an online feedreader like Pluck or Bloglines or NewsGator Online, but Randy predicts that once Google has optimized this tool (umm how long is an average beta at Google?) it could definitely mean the end of this ‘other’ online readers.
Sorting by relevance or date returns exact the same thing. Maybe I should try adding other feeds to see what this actually does, but I just don’t want to.
I can star entries, but I don’t know why I should do that. (same for the labels)
It looks Googly, and that’s a good thing, because you sort’o feel ‘at home’. But I don’t think I’ll be using it. I wonder if they will eventually remove entries, or if it’ll be like GMail, and everything ‘cached’ and gathered will remain in the reader. Then I could have like hundreds of starred entries and a load of things I’ll probably never read again. Slick but buggy. They should’ve waited longer before they released this, but the world was begging (bugging) Google for it, so I can understand that given the circumstances or context, they needed to show us they were actually busy creating this. I hope the release of the beta doesn’t mean they’ll put the development on hold.
Philipp, over at [GoogleBlogoscoped] has a nice ‘how to use this tool’ tutorial and says :
“The look-and-feel of Google Reader is similar to Gmail and Google Groups 2. You can add a star to topics. There are keyboard short-cuts (“j” for next, “k” for previous, “r” for refresh, to name a few). Categorization is implemented via labels, not folders. There are soft shades of blue and green, and round corners. Related ads aren’t included yet, but may certainly follow. There is a lot of DHTML, and use of Ajax/XMLHTTP. Ajax allows to update page content without a full server round-trip. Of course, this is intended to speed up things, none of which can be seen at the moment as the server is nearly down.”
He also posted a screenshot of a podcast-feed and that shows a cool embedded player.
” Google Reader supports RSS with media enclosures (like MP3s, or video formats).”
[image nicked from googleblogoscoped]
Philipp is quite optimistic about this. Nathan on the other hand encountered a totally Boogle experience. He’s an Opera user and the reader’s not compatible, for starters.
Other remarks at [InsideGoogle] :
“I’m thinking Google tried to reinvent the wheel, and what it wound up with was a square. Revolutionary, maybe. But squares don’t roll. I don’t like this form factor. It is a far cry from the ease of Bloglines. If Bloglines adopted this interface, I’d switch. Maybe new users will like it, but I can’t.”
Read it at [GooglePressCenter] – pdf link from [GPC Reviewer's Guides]
Read what [SearchEngineWatch] said about this.