What will be Google Reader ? Options

[Allergic]

A new Bloglines like space for Google ? This is my first thought when I discovered this morning a new entry in the Google's robots.txt called Reader. Also the http://reader.google.com redirect you to http://www.google.com/reader/ like all new Google apps and this time give you a 403 forbidden, which make me think it's in internal testing. Any cue ?

[rustybrick]

Nice find, brand new...

http://www.google.com/press/annc/reader_launch.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/feed-world.html

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002629.html

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051007-133000

[danigoldman]

What about support for the Opera browser?

http://operawatch.blogspot.com/2005/10/ope...oogle-deal.html

[seoannie]

It doesn't work within the Opera browser. It does need work, but looks somewhat promising, especially if Google video gets integrated.

[domokun]

I think it will be more like kinja.com

[Adrian]

Hmm, well, annoying is what I think of it. Looks much less efficient to use than Bloglines, seems a bit of a cross between Bloglines and Kinja.

When I first saw it, I thought the idea of Kinja was very cool, effectively merge all the feeds into one big feed and read posts in date order. But actually, I found that doesn't work very well for me. I've got over 70 feeds I follow now, that's too many to read in one go, or keep very up to date with.

I MUCH prefer Bloglines layout of having all the feeds listed down one side (and the ability to make folders and sub folders for types of feeds) and being able to see VERY quickly how many posts are unread in that feed, and view all the unread posts from each feed individually.

There are a group of feeds (Threadwatch, Scoble, SearchEngineBlog, Dilbert etc...) I follow more closely, which I cna do with Bloglines, but which is virtually impossible with Kinja, and after my breif look at Google's reader, not easy there either. It seems to be all or nothing...

(It seems to work fine in Opera for me as a side note)

In Google's reader you get a list down the left of new individual posts from all your feeds, which you then have to click on individually to read the contents. Most frustrating when you have a feed like Wired that is only a snippet, and you then have to click again to get the entire post.
Makes skim reading over feeds with lots of psots much harder. I read Scoble's blog, but out of 10 posts there might only be 1 or 2 I really read propely. So, when like at the moment, I have 25 unread posts in his feed, I can easily skim read all of them in Bloglines. In Google I'd have to click on each individual post to see if I want to read it fully or not. In short annoying.

I was recently asked how I managed to keep up with so many feeds. I hadn't considered at the time it was because Bloglines is a very efficient tool for doing so. If I were using some other tools, such as this Google reader, I would sturggle a lot more.

[bwelford]

I had exactly the same reaction as you, Adrian. Bloglines works incredibly well although the search function is for the birds.

The Google Reader was just a bad and frustrating waste of time. I'll wait for a major revision and wide-spread positive comment before venturing in again. It seems even worse than Orkut. Given all the cash and resources they now have, they really have to get some discipline and execution in what they do.

.. and that's from someone who is normally biased in a positive direction towards Google. Now if this had been the Microsoft Reader, I would not have had the same surprise..

[Adrian]

How many feeds do you follow Barry? I do wonder if it would be more suitable to someone who tracked maybe 10 or so feeds, rather than the kind of number I do.

It might also be more useful for people wanting to follow things like news headlines from the BBC or something. In that case the 'sort by relevancy' might be some use as well. For most of the feeds/blogs I follow, the relevancy thing is useless, there's the risk that a followup post would be listed much higher than the original, so you'd end up trying to read an update when you've not read the original.

It does make me wonder how they imagined people were going to use it, what sort of people it is aimed at. I'm sure tools from the likes of MSN, Yahoo! and Google are aimed more at the masses than the more technically minded people who are on the web A LOT. I've not been impressed with any of their offerings for my needs, I think MS' start.com is the worst example, at least Google have managed to get theirs working in Opera already.

[bwelford]

My Bloglines list actually has 324 newsfeeds in it, some of them being newsfeeds for searches. However they're grouped within about 20 folders and some folders I rarely look at unless I'm researching something. For example, I have quite a slew of media newsfeeds but they rarely get scanned. Like you, Adrian, I would be surprised if I check items in more than say 50 or 60 newsfeeds on most days.

[Adrian]

I wonder then, if perhaps some of these tools like the Google Reader aren't aimed at people followign a large number of feeds.

I think it was Yahoo! recently released information about RSS usage among the public, those who realised what it was, and those who used it without realising. I think most of them were just following some world event type news?

I read a comment somewhere saying it was 'over AJAX'd'. I thought it was at Threadwatch, but can't see it there now.
Thinking about it, I have to agree, I think they have shown some of the danger of AJAX, and demonstrated one of the reason I've never really looked at JS with any particular interest. They have tried reinventing the wheel in cases.

If you have more feeds than will display on one page, they don't give you a simple scroll bar, and let you use your mouse to drag it up and down, or heaven forbid actually use the specially designed wheels on most mice. No, there is a "Next 20" link, which you click on and get a nice animation effect as it scrolls, 20 at a time.

That smacks of some develoepr sat there "hey look what I can do, this is cool", when it's about as cool as a FLASH intro with no skip button. Perhaps interesting the first time, but just annoying after that, slowing down the act of using it even more.

Creating less useful replacements for perfectly working functions has always been a problem with implimenting JS, and this whole new AJAX wave just shows people haven't learnt from the first time. They are still happy to replace functionality, rather than provide additions to it.