The technology is nothing new: feed readers have been around for ages. But even though I'm tech-savvy and willing to muck around, I've never enjoyed them, even though they could have made available to me heaps of information with little effort. I've always found their user interface clumsy and the general user experience irritating. But as they've done with GMail, Google have taken a "solved problem" and made a product better than I could ever have imagined.
It's all online, of course, so when I've set it up, I can browse my feeds on any computer. It's really fast and the interface is inspired. If you're interested, check the website or google around for screenshots. It has many similarities to GMail, such as excellent keyboard shortcuts and the use of labels instead of folders.
However, it's not perfect. I have the time and the enthusiasm at the moment to spend ages exploring it and setting it up how I want. The beautiful presentation of it means I'm not reluctant to do this, but I'm sure some inexperienced users may not be so persistent. And while configuring it, I've found a few bugs and shortcomings, especially in working with folders/labels. I have no doubt all this will improve within weeks.
I wouldn't be writing about it if it were perfect, though. I'm sharing some ideas in setting up folders in case it's useful to others. That would depend on their working style, but any novice user can learn something from this. There are other great websites that have Google Reader tips that cover much more than I intend to.
All I really want to say is that if you're going to subscribe to lots of feeds, you need to organise them into folders. And if you're going to do that, you need a sensible plan. I had a rough idea, but it's taken a lot of mucking around to settle on something I'm happy with. Since there's no simple way to rename a folder, it's good to get it right first time if you can. Here I quickly present what I've done, so it may give someone some ideas.
The numbers refer to the number of unread items, not the number of feeds contained in the folders.Must read is for feeds I want to read as soon as they are updated.
Regular is for feeds I like to keep up with, but without needing to be up to date.
Irregular is for feeds I'll casually browse if I have time.
The four remaining folders, from Productivity to Misc, contain all my feeds classified by their subject matter. So if I have a bit of time but only really want to look at Ruby stuff (my favourite programming languge), I click on that and all Ruby items will appear.
Feeds can appear in more than one place. For instance, the Ruby Inside blog appears in both Ruby and Regular. The Good Math, Bad Math blog appears in both Mathematics and Irregular. In fact, all of my feeds appear in two places: they are classified by their subject matter and by how often I want to look at them. Couldn't ask for more, really.
What's put me off this technology in the past is that I go out and subscribe to heaps of blogs, only then to find the mass of information overwhelming. With this scheme, I can read through the "must reads" and the "regulars" and not worry about the rest. Google Reader allows you to zoom through the items: just keep hitting "n" and the next item will move to the top of the screen. As you go past each item, it gets marked as read, so you're not prompted to read it later. If you want to come back to an item later, you can star it, just like in GMail. I do this especially when an item has a number of interesting links I want to follow up.
Another cool thing is sharing. If I see an item that I think will be of interest to other people, I can share it. My friends will see it when they open Google Reader, and it might lead them to subscribe to the feed whence the item came. I haven't had much experience of sharing so far, but it's a neat idea and appears to be well implemented, although I understand there were some privacy concerns when it first appeared.
I've only scratched the surface in terms of features and the user experience, but it's not the point of this article to go into detail on that when so many others already have. The simplest way to sum up is this: it's as good as GMail, and a natural companion for it.
There may be other feed readers out there that are as good as Google Reader, but I've been turned off trying them in the past. As usual, Google have made a web application so good and so inviting that you can get a real kick out of using it. Now, of course, I have to be careful not to overuse it.
No comments:
Post a Comment