Google Reader for RSS Feeds

Google's going gaga for RSS feeds now, it seems. From barely flirting with them last summer they've gone straight into providing them directly and now offering a reader for them. The Google Reader's available at http://www.google.com/reader/ ; you'll need to have a Google account to use it.

The reader is empty when you first get it; you have to add RSS subscriptions. You have three options. You can keyword search for feeds through Google's collection; you can add your own, or you can import an OPML file. I went to Kebberfegg and knocked out an OPML file to try.

It worked fine. It took a few minutes, but it worked fine. Once you've got your reader populated, you can read. Google's got the subscriptions on the top of the pages, the items on the left, and the reading area on the right.

Look at the bottom of the item area. You'll see you can sort by date or relevance. And I believe my first subscriptions were sorted by relevance.

Pardon me for a moment.

(ARRRRGH! WHAT IS WITH ALL THE SORTING BY RELEVANCE! Sure it makes sense when searching the Web, but not when reading AN ENTIRE FEED, and especially AN RSS FEED WHERE THE WHOLE IDEA IS THAT YOU READ IT TO GET THE LATEST NEWS! RRRRRRRGGGGH! Enough with the DEFAULT RELEVANCE RANKING FOR EVERYTHING IN THE GOOGLEVERSE!)

Thank you.

To read, click on one of the subscriptions at the top of the page, and your item queue will refresh. Sometimes it takes a moment or two. Click on an item and the item area shows you headline, date, and either the snippet or item depending on what the feed offers. It also has a link to Show Original Item if you want to go to the page itself. I'm annoyed that this is Show Original Item. If you're using an RSS feed of a keyword search, like from say Feedster, you'll have no idea of the blog that the item you're looking at came from unless you recognize the URL or you go visit the site. If instead of Show Original Item, the URL was shown, or the domain of the URL, you could at least have a vague, at a glance idea of where what you're reading is coming from.

There's a "more items" drop-down menu for every item listed. You may unsubscribe from the feed, GMail the item, or blog the item with Blogger. Needless to say if you don't use Google's tools the utility of the extra items is very limited. On the other hand, the subscriptions area offers several extra options including Export (to OPML file.) So if you don't like this application you can take your ball and your bat and your feeds and go home.

I wasn't particularly impressed with the feed reader; it felt a little -- sterile is not exactly the right word -- a little detached. When I got a Bloglines account I immediately felt that I was part of a big, noisy, active, raucous community that was flinging information all over the place. (In a good way.) There were so many ways to connect feeds and browse feeds and find feeds. The Google Reader felt more isolated. The search results for finding feeds seemed somewhat limited. There was a more waiting to load new items than I would have expected. And while there's an option to add tags for individual items (Google calls them labels), Google offers no guidance and no context.

Of course if you use a lot of GMail and Blogger this will be right up your street since those tools are integrated extremely well into the Reader. But I'll give it a miss -- there's nothing here to persuade me away from Newsgator or Bloglines.

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