Derek’s Diary

Google Reader has improved considerably since I last used the blog reader and aggregator several months ago. Google Reader is a lot like Rojo, but much more responsive. Like Rojo, Reader does a fine job of weaving together (or aggregating) multiple feeds, interleaving their posts into a single virtual feed. I also like how Google Reader and Rojo both allow you to tag a feed with multiple labels. Contrast this with Bloglines, which still uses an antiquated and oh-so-Web-1.0 (or un-Web-2.0) folder hierarchy to organize feeds.

Google Reader, like Bloglines, has a handy set of keyboard shortcuts to help you more quickly navigate through articles and feeds and its menu items at the top of the page allow you to filter your reading list. Though Reader and Bloglines both have a ‘Keep Unread’ checkbox to allow you to preserve the unread status of an article, unlike Reader, Blogines provides no means for reading those flagged articles without also ‘reading’ newly unread articles. (This is one of my biggest Bloglines pet-peeves.) Like Rojo, Google Reader provides a ‘Star’ flag which also marks an article for later re-reading, but unlike ‘Keep Unread’, does not mark the article as permanently unread. The behaviour is subtly different, but there is an obvious overlap between the two flags, so I’m not too sure why Reader provides both. Nevertheless, Google Reader, like Rojo, makes reading previously read articles and articles of particular interest, much easier than does Bloglines.

One standard feature that is missing from Google Reader, but that most readers share, is the prominent display of feed subscriptions along with the number of unread articles in that feed. Unfortunately, since Google Reader doesn’t give you an ‘at-a-glance’ feed summary, you must randomly pick feeds to find out which ones have unread articles. This is a pain.

Google Reader can also improve in its responsiveness and useability. Though quicker than Rojo in loading and displaying articles, it still doesn’t come close to Bloglines, which is very fast. Navigating articles in Google Reader, though made easier with the keyboard shortcuts, is still awkward and imprecise. Jumping to the next article with the j key should jump immediately to the next article without delay, but instead, can sometimes leave you between articles, which is odd.

Despite Google Reader’s weaknesses, it has improved considerably and like Gmail, should continue to improve with time.

To switch between Rojo, Bloglines, or Google Reader (or use them all), all readers allow you to export and import your feed list as an Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) file.