Google Reader — I’d like readers to try out this service and tell everyone what you think. It seems to be kind of a mix of two or three other products and ideas. I seem to be getting a lot of incoming links for this service. Is it a winner or not?
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Since you asked I tried Google Reader again. I haven’t looked at it for a few months, originally finding it almost totally useless and completely inferior to many other readers.
Well, it’s twice as good as it was before, which makes it about half as good as some of the lesser readers available.
Google’s smart, but they really don’ t understand customers.
You can bank on that. They have a feeling for hysteria and the behavior of crowds (q.v.), but they are engineers and mathematicians who despise simple experiences of simple people.
I like their search engine, though. Bear in mind that they took the recommendation of a user, who asked them to keep it simple (oldest advice in the automation world). They did, and it paid off.
But we’ll see what happens long-haul.
“–“
It really looks neat. I was only able to subscribe to one feed. (You’ll be happy to know it’s yours.) I tried subscribing to a couple of others (Cringely and Slashdot) but no cigar. Each time it said I was subscribed but when I went back to “My Subscriptions” there was still only one in the list.
I’m not interested enough to try and find out if the beta is limited or if it’s just something I’m doing wrong (eg. first feed was beginner’s luck).
…ken…
Personally I think bloglines have more advanced features than greader, but I surrendered to greader for the fact that I never experienced any down time (how many times have you seen the plmber guy on bloglines site?)
I liked bloglines because I could choose a single feed and download all the news items at once or I could download all my feeds items at once if I wanted… with greader I have to remain online
they’re obviously leveraging their search engine to find feeds based on your interests. Type in FOOD and you get a list of feeds from FOOD sites. You can preview them and decide whether or not to subscribe. I think that’s a great way to harvest feeds.
The interface is nice and they’ve also released the API for their RSS code as well so you can do more with what they’ve got.
Ooops, it’s broken. Or at least sufficiently unfinished that “beta” is being extremely kind!
It grabs a list of content and shows the headers (for the single feed that I can subscribe to). The interface is a really pretty paradigm. But it’s a little jolting. When you click on “Show original item” it pops new browser window. Ouch! So when you’re done reading the item you have to close the window and click back into the Google Reader window to re-establish focus (Yeah, I use IE. Howdja guess?!) before you can move on to the next.
And here’s the rub. I sure doesn’t like any of your items (Yep, yours was the only one I was able to subscribe to … the first one I tried to subscribe to, actually. Can’t seem to get any more.).
In the window that’s supposed to display the actual item you get the header and one of those sideways chevrons (like so “>>” except the real single character). No content for the article.
You will be happy to know that the left-hand and right-hand frames with all the advertising and other stuff display just fine. Even the rest of the centre frame (Comments, Please Leave a Comment) is peachy. It’s just the actual content window that’s broken.
How good is that?!
…ken…
What’s the point… I use an aggregator, and prefer it to their system. It’s better than before, but still not great.
I went through all the feeds I’m subscribed to at Bloglines and tried to subscribe to them in Google Reader – greader errored out on more than half of them. The error was misleading, too. It said “Oops…an error occurred. Please try again in a few seconds.” I went to the next feed from bloglines and it subscribed fine. Tried the one that generated the error again and same error message. If greader can’t even subscribe to all feeds, what chance does it have of succeeding?
Sorry to be such a pest. Tried once more to see if I could subscribe to more feeds. Joy this time. Got Cringely. His content displays. What’s different about yours?
…ken…
It’s hopeless, John. You can’t organise your feeds into folders/categories, so if you have a few dozen feeds you can’t get a quick glance overview. And for RSS feeds I only want to see a 1 or 2 line summary, or even just a headline, not a whole screenful of text from the article.
I’ve used Google Reader for a while, and I really like it. I’ve never had any problems, and the Feed search works pretty well.
Feed search and subscribe: cool.
Only the latest article from each feed showing up in my reading list: Not cool. Maybe I need to wait a while. But still, I would like to see more than just one article after I subscribe to a feed. I can’t even seem to request older articles that are still in the feed.
Now I can see newer articles in your feed, but greader still does not see them. This is lame.
I’ve been using Reader for a while after switching from Bloglines (damn that plumber!). I like it but it is definitely still a Beta in old-school terms (i.e. it is a little buggy).
The lens feature is nice but doesn’t scale when you increase your browser’s font size.
Your feed only shows the headline and brief description, not the full article which is annoying for me but probably helps your ad revenues!
Tried it twice, now. Tried several. None of them handles feeds as well as Safari. But, that’s all I use Safari for.
It’s the only rss aggregator I use. My needs aren’t much. Everything I subscribe to (22 at this time) works fine. Occasionally a feed gets weird with double and triple entries from Leo LaPorte’s operation but nothing earth shattering to me. I don’t like the lack of folders or general organization , but I love the “star” feature. It’s simple and that’s good enough to me.
I first tried it when it was released, but it didn’t work at all. I gave it a try again a month later and have been using it since. I never used another reader before though so I don’t have much to compare it to.
I successfully subscribed to all the feeds I wanted and used different labels (like Gmail) for them. Although I set up all the labels, I don’t really use them. Whenever I open the site, I just scroll down and load the pages for stories that interest me.
Sometimes the reader fails to load or loads slowly, but a quick refresh solves this problem. Every once and a while, I’ve gotten “An error has occurred, please try again later” and have to reload the site again.
I love using the keyboard shortcuts since I don’t always have a mouse with me and marking items with stars (just like Gmail).
Hope this helps.
I’ve used GReader off and on for the past few weeks and I find it to be nothing special. Bloglines is still my favorite (although the plumber is getting annoying).
The one thing I find difficult in GReader is to unsubscribe from a feed (not your feed!).
I’ve been using Google Reader for a good while now (9 months to a year) mainly for Dvorak Uncensored, and a handful of other feeds. I’ve never had a problem subscribing to a feed. There are a few interface/operational/other quirks that I would like changed (or at least a preference setting for), but that’s not enough to discourage me from using it.
There is one main reason I use Google Reader. I have two laptops, a home desktop, and a handful of workstations at my job. I’ve found that any of the other readers aren’t designed to sync what I’ve read and what I haven’t between a bunch of computers. Having a centralized reader with a web interface solves this easily. A classic solution to a classic problem. (And Google Reader is just what I stumbled upon first. I just now learned about bloglines reading the other comments.) Another benefit is a single sign-on for my email (personal at least) and my rss feeds.
To balance out the post, here’s a reason I am considering not using it anymore. As with everything you do through their services, Google is logging it. I’m starting to find it a bit scary how targetted their advertisements are. This is their business and it is to be expected since I’m using their service for free, so I’m not complaining. Still, its making me consider finding an alternative solution (or building my own).
I’ve been using it for a while, and I say that overall it is a winner. It works better than any other RSS aggregator I’ve used, website or otherwise. I like the option to see all the feeds at once more than I expected to. The only regret I have about it is that you cannot mark all feeds as read, or define a bottom of the feed list, so you don’t know when you’ve seen all the new feeds or not, which is tough when you have 50 feeds. Not a gripe, but I would like it to allow me to highlight feeds so I can easily spot the podcasts in the articles list.
I wrote a lengthy review of Reader last month and ultimately decided not to post it. But since you’re soliciting, I’ve stuck it up here: http://allgooey.blogspot.com/
While I was researching Reader, I can upon some info to the effect that Google is readying a number of other interfaces for their feeds backend and that the current reader lens is merely one prototype (source: http://niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/12/google_reader_a.html). I thought my review was pretentious in light of the product’s experimental nature.
I’ve been using this for a couple months now. When it first came out it was super slow and turned a lot of people off, but now it’s pretty fast. Of course it could be improved, but if you start using the key shortcuts it’s great. Though the labels are basically useless.
What I think Google is generally doing is bookmarking parts of the industry. They basically create a very simple product which is of no practical use to anyone (IM with Google Talk, RSS (well, Atom…) aggregator with the Reader etc.) just to say “OK, so we’re eventually going to build something here” and call it a Beta.
The Reader is fine for keeping up with up to, say, five feeds or so, but gets hopelessly cluttered if you subscibe to more than that. The basic AJAX user interface is good, much better than bloglines infact, but the inability to browse just one feed at a time tends to mean you have to browse through hundreds of news items to get to the ones you’re currently interested in.
If one of your feeds is Digg, for example, everything else is burried under the plethora of posts on people finding the latest “Best of”-list of the most powerfull ways to use navel fluff for Web 2.0…
And yes, I know you can use filters to only show the feeds you want, but that’s hopelessly impractical compared to bloglines’ simple “click to view the new stuff in this feed”-principle.
Certainly AJAX is the way news aggregators should go, but while the current state of Google Reader isn’t missing features that are cool, it is missing those that are essential to the daily use of a news aggregator.
Extra points for making the API open btw, but after the runaway success of Google Maps that should be a no-brainer…
Checked it out, but found it inferior to the MyWay home page I am not using. I really don’t see the point compared to the alternatives.
I didn’t get a chance to really read all the comments, so please forgive any redundancies.
I have not had any problems subscribing to any feed..at all.
Every month or so for about a week, it won’t register that I’ve read anything, so I have to sort through the stories I’ve already read.
This past month it got worse. Not only did it not stop displaying the stories I’ve read, it produced multiples of that story and mixed them up with the stuff I had not looked at. I’d log in and see 200+ stories, most of which were multiples. VERY frustrating and I find myself not checking my reader very much anymore.
I like it, they just need to make it less buggy.
I have been using it for a while now to read ~70 feeds. I haven’t encountered any of the problems other commenters mentioned about subscribing and I wholeheartedly recommend Reader to my friends and family, who are not as technically inclined. It is easy to use and I think the search feature is excellent at finding new feeds, which is a big barrier to entry for less tech-savvy users. That said, it is beta software, so it does occasionally hiccup and display a duplicate story or otherwise produce some minor annoyance.
Love the blog, and especially your participation in TWIT … as for Google Reader, I gave it a thumbs down back on October 12:
http://ckpcreative.com/lohad/?p=146
Based on many of the posted comments, I may have to go back and give GR a try, but at this point, I’d need a pretty compelling reason to switch away from BlogExpress.